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GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

AND OTHER ADDRESSES 



By the Same Author 



THE MAKING OF OUR MIDDLE 
SCHOOLS. An Account of the 
Development of Secondary PMu- 
cation in the United States. 

Crown 8vo. $3.00 



GOVERNMENT 
BY INFLUENCE 

AND 

OTHER ADDRESSES 

BY 

ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN 

n 

COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF THE 



UNITED STATES 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 

LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 

1910 



V 






■3 



\^ 



^u^ 



Copyright, in 10 
By Longmans, Green, and Co. 



THE UNIVERSITY PSBSS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



©Ci.A^^^)9479 



> TO 

' JAMES BURRILL ANGELL 



NOTE 

THE addresses included in this volume 
were delivered on various occasions dur- 
ing the first three years of my service 
in the Bureau of Education. Those of the 
number which have already appeared in print 
have been scattered through various publications, 
some of them of limited circulation, and it is 
safe to assume that there are not a dozen per- 
sons any one of whom has seen more than two 
or three of the whole collection. For permis- 
sion to reprint in this form, acknowledgment 
is made to the publishers of those periodicals in 
which certain of the addresses were first pub- 
lished. The names of publications in which any 
of them have hitherto appeared are mentioned 
under their several titles. Alterations have 
been freely made in the text and considerable 
portions have been rewritten for this volume. 
Occasional repetitions have, however, been pur- 
posely retained. 

E. E. B. 

Washington, August 26, 1909. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER ■ PAGE 

I. Government Bt Influence 1 

II. The Self-respect of Cities 25 

III. The Development of Agricultural Edu- 

cation ." 43 

IV. Some Relations of Religious Education 

AND Secular Education 61 

V. The Culture of Righteousness .... 75 

VI. The Public Schools in the Movement for 

International Arbitration .... 9T 

VII. Possible Co-operation between the Edu- 
cational Associations of Different 
Countries Ill 

VIII. Are we an Inventive People in the Field 

of Education? 119 

IX. Children in the United States : Some of 

their Needs 145 

X. Training for Mother- work 167 

XI. The Work of Women's Organizations in 

Education 185 

XII. The Distinctive Functions of University 
AND Normal School in the Preparation 
of Teachers 197 

XIII. Industrial Education as a National In- 

terest 209 

XIV. The Art of the Teacher 219 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

An Address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the 
University of West Virginia, June 17, 1908, and at the 
University Day Exercises of the University of North 
Carolina, October 12, 1908. Published in part in the 
University of North Carolina Record, October, 1908. 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

THE subject of which I am to speak is 
suggested by a saying of George Wash- 
ington, which may be found in one of 
his letters to Henry Lee, written in 1786. The 
correspondence had to do with *'the present tu- 
mults in Massachusetts," referring doubtless to 
what is known as Shays' rebellion. Lee had 
urged that the influence of the Congress be 
brought to bear, with a view to ending the out- 
break, and Washington replied, *' Influence is 
not government." 

This saying went to the heart of the difficulty 
under which the new states of that time were 
laboring. It was the ''critical period " in the 
history of the country. Independence had been 
won, and nationality had not yet been achieved. 
The Congress had no power. It could exercise 
an influence and nothing more, when the only 
hope for peace lay in authority, with force at its 
command. But that critical time was abnormal 
and could not last. The saying of Washington 
is true for all time if we take it to mean that 



4 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

influence where there is no authority is not gov- 
ernment. What I shall endeavor to show is 
that under ordinary conditions the power of 
government, in steadily increasing measure, is 
to be exerted in the form of influence and not 
of force, and that government by influence is 
one of the chief concerns of modern education. 
A generation after Washington wrote this 
letter, Daniel Webster was a member of the 
constitutional convention of Massachusetts. In 
the course of one of the debates of that body he 
turned to the subject of taxation for the support 
of schools, and thereupon made use of the fol- 
lowing words: "This commonwealth, with other 
of the New England states, early adopted, and 
has constantly maintained the principle, that it 
is the undoubted right, and the bounden duty of 
government, to provide for the instruction of all 
youth. . . . We regard it as a wise and liberal 
system of police, by which property, and life, 
and the peace of society are secured. . . . We 
hope to excite a feeling of respectability, and a 
sense of character, by enlarging the capacity, and 
increasing the sphere of intellectual enjoyment. 
By general instruction, we seek, as far as pos- 
sible, to purify the whole moral atmosphere; to 
keep good sentiments uppermost, and to turn 
the strong current of feeling and opinion, as well 
as the censures of the law, and the denunciations 
of religion, against immorality and crime. We 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 5 

hope for a security, beyond the law, and above 
the law, in the prevalence of enlightened and 
well principled moral sentiment." 

We have here the doctrine stated in the clear- 
est language and in its lowest terms. It is 
easier, cheaper, and better to keep order by 
making men moral and self-governing than by 
maintaining more guardians of the peace. This 
is the doctrine in its lowest terms, for it takes 
account only of the police function of govern- 
ment and of education only as forming law- 
abiding citizens. But if influence is the better 
part of the power of the police, then in an en- 
lightened state, when we come into the wider 
ranges of governmental activity, influence must 
play a still larger part and force a relatively 
lessening part. Government by influence, in 
other words, is destined to be a generally pre- 
vailing mode of government. 

We are proceeding here on the assumption 
that governments aim to further self-govern- 
ment. A central government does its best work 
when it does most to promote local self-govern- 
ment of a really effective kind. Local government 
does its best when it promotes individual self- 
government among its citizens. This is not to 
say that the best government is that which 
governs least. Freedom and rule are not the 
opposite ends of a see-saw, one going up when- 
ever the other goes down. The more a good 



6 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

government does, the more freedom there is, 
through increase of moral and inteUigent self- 
control. But it is not self-government alone 
which is an end of government. The end is a 
co-operative self-government. It is not enough 
that men be made free, as regards external con- 
straint, but that as free men they shall work 
together for common ends. Through such free 
co-operation the empty principle of liberty 
acquires a moral content. To get together and 
work together, not through compulsion from 
without but through an inner purpose and con- 
viction — that is a consummation which men 
are seeking in our time, and government itself 
is one great means to that end. 

We have recently seen a striking example of 
this newer political ideal, in the conference of 
governors at Washington. That gathering is a 
thing to be pondered, from many points of view. 
Just on the eve of a great political contest, a 
President who is himself a consummate party 
leader and who stands for the most advanced 
federalism of our time, called into conference 
the governors of all of the states and territories, 
for a discussion of questions affecting the general 
welfare. The response was as frank and un- 
reserved as was the invitation. All who could 
be present, nine-tenths of the whole number, 
were there. On all hands it was understood 
that the purpose was not to subordinate the 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 7 

states but rather to quicken their activity in 
ways in which the states could work together. 
The representatives of the states not only carried 
out their part of the program, but on their own 
account went forward into new arrangements 
for future co-operation. And so that most diffi- 
cult thing in political history was accomplished, 
a positive advance, in which the balance between 
the parts and the whole, between individuals 
and their society, was held to its true level. 
Here is not only government by influence, but 
the fruit of long years of government by influence. 

The terms which we are using may be em- 
ployed in different meanings, and a little more of 
precision is desirable at this point. After I had 
in all innocence chosen the title for this address, 
I came upon exactly the same expression used 
to describe some of the worst tendencies of our 
political life. Influence is a thing not unknown 
in the baser forms of politics, but in such use the 
accent is often transferred to the penultimate syl- 
lable. Government by influence finds its deadly 
opposite in government by ''influence." 

What we are now considering is the organized, 
permanent, and coherent influence embodied in 
the institutions of education. Public libraries 
and great academies of science and the arts have 
their part in its exercise, but we can speak here 
of only common schools and universities; and 
since equal attention cannot be devoted to both 



8 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

in our one short hour, we must, in this university 
gathering, consider chiefly the university side of 
the matter. 

But it is not to be forgotten that, in this coun- 
try, schools and universities have been welded 
into one system and their influence is one in- 
fluence. In our striving after universal educa- 
tion, the university and the primary school 
represent the two poles of universality. The 
school is for all of the people, but can teach only 
a small part of human knowledge. The univer- 
sity is for all of the sciences, though only a por- 
tion of our people can come under its direct 
influence. But the university unfolds the general 
scheme of knowledge and investigates the prin- 
ciples of selection by which the scope of instruc- 
tion in the elementary schools is defined. On 
the other hand, the training and the ideals of 
schools of the earlier grades, elementary and 
secondary, are the groundwork of instruction in 
the universities; and the needs of those schools 
have somewhat to do with the arrangement of 
university courses, since the schools are the 
channels through which the good things that 
universities have to offer are chiefly spread 
abroad. We cannot too strongly emphasize this 
solidarity of our various teaching institutions, 
for it is one of the surest guarantees of our es- 
sential democracy. 

There is, moreover, one aspect of elementary 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 9 

education which must be noted in passing. The 
primary school as a moral agency broadens out 
into special schools for wayward children and 
the new activities of the juvenile court. Through 
the juvenile court and the public sentiment 
which has brought that court into being, the 
educational purpose is gradually spreading 
through our whole criminal jurisprudence. We 
do not give over the punishment of wrongdoers, 
for a government that does not punish in case of 
need is no government at all. But we are learn- 
ing that in many instances society has more to 
gain from the moral education of the criminal 
than from his punishment, and we have come to 
prefer education to vengeance wherever it can 
be made to yield a better return. The modifica- 
tion of our penal practice by educational aims 
and methods is accordingly one of the no- 
table developments of the modern system of 
government. 

It is a change in the direction of government 
by influence. The state seeks, as rapidly as 
possible, to replace external compulsion by 
internal self-control on the part of its citizens. 
Purposes consistent with the common good, sus- 
tained by knowledge of the meaning of those 
purposes,^ and brought within the sphere of hope 
by the trained intelligence and will which make 
them possible of attainment — these are to re- 
place the rule of force as fast as human nature 



10 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

shall render such a change practicable. " Final 
causes" by little and little are to supplant 
*' efficient causes" in our political relations. No 
one but an enthusiast or a doctrinaire could 
expect government in its entirety to be so trans- 
formed, short of a millennium too remote to 
give us much concern in present-day {)olitics. 
But the most practical of politicians cannot 
overlook the fact that modern states are com- 
mitted to the program of a steady expansion of 
government in the form of education, involving 
as it must a relative lessening of government in 
the form of force. Herein lies, more particularly, 
the program of modern democracy. 

If this brief glance at elementary education 
has helped to a clearing-up of our terms, we 
may get some hint of the wide range of this mode 
of government in a consideration of the univer- 
sity, as the most advanced and mature of its 
organs. Here again we must limit ourselves to 
a very few representative instances, having in 
mind particularly the service rendered by state 
universities. 

Governors and legislatures now turn ordinarily 
and naturally to their state universities for com- 
petent information and opinion on a great variety 
of subjects. Within the past decade particularly 
we have seen this governmental habit taking 
root. In one state during a recent session of the 
legislature more than a score of important bills 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 11 

were submitted by the governor and by legis- 
lative committees to different departments of the 
university of the state, for expert advice as to 
certain of their scientific bearings. In another 
state advice is freely taken at the university 
with reference to the statutory form of all meas- 
ures of special importance, and the state com- 
missions which discharge some of the most 
important functions of government are organized 
in close touch with those departments of the 
university in which the best knowledge of the 
subjects under consideration is to be found. In 
still another state the examination of agricul- 
tural fertilizers, and other administrative re- 
sponsibilities of large practical importance, are 
devolved upon the agricultural college and the 
university. This is but a small indication of the 
extent which the practice has already attained, 
a practice which largely affects institutions on a 
private as well as those on a public foundation. 
It is impartial publicity, especially in the form 
of scientific information, that is especially ex- 
pected from the universities. At their best 
estate, in furthering such impartial publicity 
they are lending a new character, a new and 
peculiar dignity, to the government of our 
states. They are working with the steadfast 
stars that in their courses fight for righteousness. 
Of the countless ways in which such influence 
makes for better things, let me mention here but 
two: 



12 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

In the first place, the increase of statistical 
knowledge and of interest in statistics is having 
one result that could hardly have been foreseen. 
Numerical statements become significant only 
through comparison. But when comparison is 
made between the statistics of different munici- 
palities or institutions or corporations, it is com- 
monly found that they represent such diverse 
methods of recording and reporting facts that 
they are in reality incommensurable. The im- 
mediate outcome of such a discovery is not in- 
frequently irritation and a misuse of strong 
language. An old proverb which declares the 
truthfulness of figures and brings them into 
patriotic association with the boyhood of George 
Washington, comes in for its share of satirical 
abuse. But this is all on the way to something 
better. Those who care to know the truth have 
more allies than those who would misrepresent 
or conceal the truth. The steady pressure of a 
demand for figures that can be compared be- 
gins after a time to affect the systems of ac- 
counting from which such figures are to be 
drawn. Under modern business methods an 
improved system of accounting is a key to the 
betterment of business processes and a key also 
to that publicity which is the ground of a good 
understanding between a given concern and its 
constituency. The statistical report affects the 
accounting, improved accounting benefits the 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 13 

business accounted for, and together they bring 
the better business into better relations with the 
people whom it serves. So a scientific report 
becomes the mild influence through which a 
real reform is accomplished; and if the thing 
reformed should chance to be some branch of 
the public or semi-public service, in which the 
commonw^ealth is vitally concerned, we find 
that a result of really governmental dimensions 
has been accomplished. 

An illustration might be drawn from the later 
work of the Interstate Commerce Commission. 
The services of the statistician of that body in 
devising improved forms for accounting in the 
transportation systems concerned, which may 
serve as a basis for more nearly uniform and 
comparable reports, marks an important ad- 
vance not only in the work of the Commission 
but also in the internal administration of all 
American railroads. Of like significance is the 
activity in recent years of the National Census 
OflSce, in promoting greater uniformity and 
precision in the fiscal accounts and reports of 
American municipalities. 

Let us turn now to a very different aspect 
of government. The form in which any piece of 
legislation is cast is oftentimes a question of 
chief concern. A policy which has won out 
overwhelmingly at the polls may fail at last or 
be too long delayed because of the neglect to 



14 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

embody it in a measure which can stand the test 
of constitutionality. This is a test which may 
not be applied till the law has gone into effect, 
and usually not until the legislature which passed 
the law has been succeeded by another, or by 
two or three or more. This is so in the nature 
of things. It is not to be expected that a court 
should pass upon a constitutional question when 
it has no case before it and no argument of 
counsel pro and con. Yet much more can, un- 
doubtedly, be done than is customarily done, 
out of court, in the way of a preliminary exami- 
nation of given measures with reference to the 
constitutional questions involved. 

A variety of other questions may properly 
enter into such preliminary scrutiny: the re- 
lation of the new act to preceding acts, the 
enumeration of acts and parts of acts which it 
repeals, and all of those other points of finished 
legislation which even a layman can dimly ap- 
prehend, but which, in the presence of lawyers, 
legislators, and jurists, it would embarrass him 
to enumerate. There is a fair field here, it would 
seem, for faculties of law or university depart- 
ments of politics and jurisprudence to do a work 
comparable with that which has been done for 
nearly forty years by the "Parliamentary Coun- 
sel to the Treasury" in Great Britain. And 
courts and legislatures and the people at large 
would benefit by such a service. 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 15 

A preliminary scrutiny usurps none of the 
proper functions of legislatures and courts. Its 
influence, however, could hardly be limited abso- 
lutely to the form as distinguished from the 
substance of our laws. For such service, reg- 
ularly organized, as it should be, and carried 
on through a series of years, must necessarily be 
more and more affected by studies in compara- 
tive legislation. The men engaged therein must 
come to see the growing need of certain practi- 
cable uniformities in the legislation of different 
states. Their advice in the more general ques- 
tions of legislation, beyond the realm of partisan 
politics, must become increasingly valuable. 
Such procedure offers much to hope for in the 
improvement of our annual output of new laws, 
as regards their consistency, their constitution- 
ality, and their workmanlike and workable 
character. 

I have merely hinted in the briefest manner 
at two of the many ways in which organized 
influence as represented by the university is 
taking its place along with positive law and the 
power that enforces law in our modern systems 
of government. But this movement is not going 
forward without interruption or question. We 
must now take account of the fact that our 
legislative bodies in particular are commonly in- 
disposed to turn over any of their ordinary func- 
tions to other men or bodies of men, who may 



16 GOVERNMENT BY INFEUENCE 

be designated as *' experts." It is the policy of 
referring legislative questions to commissions 
whose members are not members of the legis- 
lature to which objection is made. The reluct- 
ance of our federal Congress to commit the 
framing of tariff schedules to a tariff commission 
is a case in point, and many others might be 
cited from our recent legislative history, both 
state and national. 

I would say that, in the main, this attitude 
is clearly justified. It is the business of a 
legislature to enact legislation. The members 
are chosen by the people for this purpose. It 
would be shirking responsibility for them to del- 
egate this function to others who have not been 
so chosen by the people. They are to interpret 
the will of the people, in the forms of posi- 
tive law. They have the training and experi- 
ence, or are at least in control of the machinery, 
which would enable them to ascertain the mind 
of the people upon any question of public policy, 
more accurately than it could be ascertained by 
any scholastic or scientific body. Theirs is 
accordingly a high calling, and it is a matter of 
general concern that their office should be re- 
garded with respect and confidence. 

But it becomes increasingly clear that every 
large political question has not only a side of will 
but also a side of knowledge. It is a necessity of 
good government that the will of the people, as- 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 17 

certained by fair political processes, shall proceed 
on a firm basis of knowledge, ascertained by 
adequate scientific processes. A legislative body 
does not gain in public confidence when it in- 
sists upon employing bungling processes of its 
own for the ascertainment of the facts of any 
science, which a scientific body is equipped to 
ascertain without waste of effort and with all pos- 
sible precision. In like manner, a scientific body, 
however competent in its own field, fails to com- 
mand public confidence when it enters the field 
of partisan politics, and employs in a bungling 
way the processes of which successful politicians 
are masters. In either case, the trespasser upon 
another's field is only made ridiculous. But since 
science and politics manifestly must have more 
and more to do with each other in our modern 
life, it is of urgent importance that each should 
respect the functions and methods of the other, 
and that the organs of both, in their respective 
spheres, should command full public confidence. 

It follow^s that, as scientific bodies which seek 
to secure legislation must entrust their cause to 
legislators and politicians who have won public 
confidence, so legislative bodies which require 
scientific information for any purpose may best 
turn to scientists of established competence to 
obtain such information. 

This view is, I think, to be strongly empha- 
sized ; and equal emphasis is to be laid upon its 



18 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

obvious corollary, that governments cannot be 
adequately served on their scientific side by 
sporadic and temporary commissions, constituted 
ad hoc. Those great and permanent public in- 
terests with which government has to do, require 
the service of permanent scientific bodies, as 
thoroughly grounded and tested by time and as 
impressive in their constitution and traditions as 
are the other organs of government. Much of 
the objection to special commissions arises from 
their transient and tentative character. It can- 
not be expected that legislatures will bind them- 
selves to the practice and custom of referring 
scientific questions for scientific determination, 
except as established institutions, comparable 
with themselves in dignity and reputation, shall 
become the bearers of such responsibilities. The 
sciences, moreover, are so inwrought one with 
another, that isolated institutions, representing 
single branches of knowledge, cannot ordinarily 
serve these great ends. It is only the institution 
in which the various sciences are all cultivated, 
in their various relationships, which can fill this 
large place in our governmental system. Modern 
governments, in other words, have imperative 
need of the modern university. Nor is this an 
altogether new and modern need. It might 
easily be traced back to medieval precedents, 
without abatement of its new urgency under 
these modern conditions. 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 19 

In the subjects to which it has given special 
attention, a state university should be peculiarly 
fitted to render such public service. Its libraries 
and laboratories have grown to meet the needs of 
passing years; its faculties contain men well 
seasoned in their several departments of knowl- 
edge, together with young men fresh from the 
best world-centers of instruction ; it has its long- 
tested method and apparatus for the selection of 
competence and the detection of incompetence; 
it has long concerned itself with the wider inter- 
ests of the state, economic, sociologic, and pro- 
fessional, and can readily turn its investigations 
toward new and related needs as they may arise ; 
and its every department is reinforced in any 
undertaking by the organized whole of the in- 
stitution, with its traditions of scientific excel- 
lence and of unselfish public service. Without 
political influence of a partisan kind and with 
little power to enforce any statutory requirements, 
the university may render the strongest possible 
support to other branches of government, by 
merely ascertaining and putting forth scientific 
information concerning things in which the state 
is vitally concerned. 

It is not to be forgotten that what has been said 
of the scientific side of government applies 
equally to the side of the arts. It is greatly to be 
desired, and is, indeed, inevitable, that govern- 
ment in America shall concern itself more seri- 



20 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ously than it has hitherto with art as a public 
good and a pubhc necessity; and that the fine 
arts shall find in our twentieth century univer- 
sities as complete an academic organization and 
equipment as that which the nineteenth century 
has gained for the sciences of nature. 

In view of the growing dependence of modern 
states upon science and the arts for the attain- 
ment of their political ends, it has been sug- 
gested of late that the institutions of education, 
with the university at their head, may fairly be 
regarded as a fourth branch of government, co- 
ordinate with the executive, the legislative, and 
the judicial branches. The service which these 
institutions have to render is so distinctive and 
so indispensable that this characterization is 
not wide of the mark. Education is, indeed, both 
more and less than such a governmental power. 
It is less, in that it commands as yet only partial 
recognition as having any governmental charac- 
ter whatever. It is more, in that it underlies all 
government, and trains the citizens who are to 
make our governments whatever they may come 
to be. In certain particulars our American edu- 
cational systems are more nearly analogous to 
the ecclesiastical establishment where church and 
state are united. Such comparisons, however, 
can serve for only a partial characterization of 
this most universal agency of modern civilization. 
But public policy in America, and doubtless in 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 21 

other lands, would seem to demand at least so 
much as this, that there be secured to our schools 
and universities an adequacy of financial support, 
a deferential regard, and an independence of ac- 
tion within the limits of public responsibility, 
which shall be comparable with that accorded to 
any one of the ordinary branches of government. 
While the responsibility for our American edu- 
cational systems rests primarily with the states, 
it must be clear that the federal government can- 
not be indifferent nor inactive as regards these 
concerns, when education has to do with such 
fundamental interests of our national life. Gen- 
erally speaking, the states have now advanced 
further than the nation in the employment of 
educational institutions as an arm of government. 
But the nation has gone further than the states 
in the equipment of special offices of scientific 
research. In state and nation alike, I am per- 
suaded, the full value of the sciences for govern- 
mental purposes can be gained only by some form 
of academic organization. Scattered laboratories 
and libraries, the special investigations insti- 
tuted from time to time, the labors of special in- 
quirers, no matter how competent in their several 
fields — all of these things must be brought into 
some form of conscious and permanent cohe- 
rence, if they are to do their proper work in our 
governmental scheme. They are so brought 
together here in your vigorous and rising univer- 



n GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

sity. They must be so brought together in the 
capital of the nation, whether the resulting insti- 
tution shall bear the name of university or any 
other worthy name. When such a national in- 
stitution shall finally come into being, it will be 
found to have unnumbered avenues of public 
service, for in it government by influence, so far 
as our national life is concerned, may be expected 
to reach its highest and most varied development. 

But in a wider sense all academic and cultural 
institutions throughout the land have their share 
in the governmental influence of the nation. This 
is true whether they be public or private in their 
formal organization. The special responsibility 
of public schools and state universities cannot 
be overlooked. But all agencies of organized 
and permanent influence, scientific, artistic, or, 
in broader language, spiritual and moral, are 
parts of our one system of essential government. 
In this land more than in any other land, such 
agencies are carrying the new burdens of gov- 
ernment and blazing the way for new modes of 
p-overnment. The more recent trend of our his- 
tory lends double emphasis to this conviction. 

We have taken a new place among the nations 
of the earth, and it is a matter of moment in world 
affairs that we preserve our essential character 
under the strain of these new relationships. The 
most obvious need that the new times have 
brought is the need of a larger army and navy. 



GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 23 

That need is unmistakable and will be met, if it 
has not already been met. The most imperative 
need that the new times have brought is the need 
that we continue to give to influence rather than 
force the leading place in our political program. 
The new expenditures required to meet the need 
of more battleships and a larger standing army 
must be matched by new expenditures for the 
increase of knowledge and intelligence and 
moral power. If our expenditures for the higher 
influence shall lag behind our expenditures for 
force, we shall find the center of gravity of our 
policy shifting from its former placing among 
the finer elements of our national character to a 
new^ center in our military establishment. It is 
not necessary to exaggerate this danger. But 
danger there is, and it should not be blinked. 
We cannot escape it if, over a term of years, we 
permit our expenditures for war to grow more 
rapidly than our expenditures for education. 

Our power in the world depends upon keep- 
ing our ideas, our standards, our convictions to 
the front. To spread abroad the love of truth 
as the scientist loves truth, the conception of 
justice as it prevails in our highest courts, the 
appreciation of honor and of beauty, and that 
freedom bounded by self-restraint which belongs 
alike to morals and to art — to spread these 
things abroad, and through them to win the 
admiration and confidence of the peoples of 



24 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

other lands — that is the program for our world- 
poUtics if the higher influence is still to play 
its part in our affairs. Let all institutions of 
science and the arts join with our governmental 
schools and universities to magnify these things, 
along with our provision for the national defense. 
Their influence will double the strength of our 
army and our fleet, and will keep us still in the 
forefront of the world. 

This new age, young men and women, as I 
have tried to assure you, is an age in which men 
are to be ruled more by their aims than by their 
fears. The forces of this world are to be subject 
to the purposes of the spirit. In a thousand ways 
which no one can foresee, men will try to make 
you believe that force rules and the spirit can 
only obey. Let no man take thy crown. The 
spirit rules, and force is only its minister. You 
are to be of those who will make this state a 
state in which righteousness is uppermost, the 
righteousness which religion cherishes, the right- 
eousness which has its firm allies in science and 
the arts and in all liberal education. There is no 
private learning in a public school nor in any 
school. Science and public service are two sides 
of the same shield. You are servants of the state 
and the nation to-day, and we count on you and 
your fellows throughout the land to maintain our 
government as a government by ideas, a govern- 
ment by truth and righteousness. 



II 

THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 

An Address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the 
University of Cincinnati, June 1, 1907. Published in 
the University of Cincinnati Record, June, 1907. 



II 

THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 

THERE is a noticeable difference in the 
way the men of different cities speak of 
the cities to which they belong. Each 
city, large or small, seems to be represented in a 
certain prevalent tone, of pride or disparagement, 
in which its citizens refer to their citizenship. 
And this tone comes in time to be so deep-seated 
and habitual that it can be altered only with the 
greatest difficulty. 

It is good for any city and good for its people 
that it should be an object of their respect and 
pride. When Paul asked to be heard by the 
Chief Captain at Jerusalem, he said, *'I am a 
man which am a Jew of Tarsus, ... a citizen 
of no mean city." The words won for him his 
hearing, and they have reflected honor on the city 
of Tarsus through all the Christian centuries. 

We Americans are ready to speak with familiar 
reproach of the things that lie nearest to us. On 
the whole, it is well that this disposition should 
take its course, for it guards us against a too easy 
complacency. There is something wanting in any 



28 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

society that cannot stand a fair amount of criti- 
cism and even ridicule from those who know it 
best. Let criticism, even of the gargoyle-cartoon 
variety, have its way. Let it tap along our social 
engineries till the cracks and hollow places are 
revealed. But if our patriotism comes near 
enough home to touch the immediate community 
in which we dwell, we shall make the main note 
of our speech concerning the place of our abode 
a note of confidence and hope and pride. 

For the most part, we find our people ready 
enough to plume themselves on the bigness of 
their cities, and on anything, indeed, that can be 
expressed in the superlative degree. That is our 
"Hyperbole of praise comparative." But I 
think we may observe among men of positive 
strength a certain reticence in the use of adjec- 
tives of comparison. Things can be compared 
only by being thrown into the same class. And 
for the more important things in the world such 
classification is pretty sure to obscure some of 
the characters which thoughtful men regard as 
things of price. No, comparatives and super- 
latives are not generally the most veracious forms 
of speech. That self-respect of cities of which I 
wish to speak to-night does not rest mainly on 
comparisons. 

Let us turn our attention, then, to the things 
concerning the higher life of cities in which citi- 
zens may be expected to take an honorable pride. 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 29 

We do not forget that cities have their side of 
shame which must on occasion be exposed ; and 
we do not deny that the grosser triumphs of 
mere fatness and wealth in cities may have a 
glory of their own. But for to-night we will con- 
cern ourselves only with the things of higher worth 
and of good report. If there be any virtue and if 
there be any praise, let us think for a little time 
on these things. But in making some analysis of 
the things that confirm the self-respect of cities, 
you will not expect me to make immediate appli- 
cation to your own Cincinnati. The fame of your 
city is so broadly grounded and secure that all 
that I have to say might find notable illustration 
here. But it would not seem altogether felicitous 
that a stranger should undertake to assign praise 
before an audience who knows this community 
so much better than himself. Let the application 
be of your making. It can hardly be doubted 
that so it will be abundant and will be fairly 
distributed. 

The higher life of the city is not an abstract no- 
tion, a thing apart from the city's material well- 
being. It is grounded in economic and commer- 
cial conditions. It is well that the citizen should 
take pride in the variety and extent of the city's 
commerce and manufactures, in the intelligence 
and integrity which mark its prevalent business 
methods, in the soundness of its banks, in the 
abundance of opportunity for labor, in the good 



30 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

understanding between employer and employee, 
and in the general well-being of its laboring 
people. Without such conditions as these the 
higher interests of the city will be cramped and 
dwarfed; and it is, moreover, exactly in the 
maintenance of economic soundness that the 
moral strain of its men of affairs finds some of 
its finest testing and manifestation. 

Closely connected with these things is the natu- 
ral pride in the city's government. Such pride 
may well be excited when the people of all sec- 
tions and classes interest themselves in the 
affairs of the municipality and participate in its 
political life; when the government has long 
been free from scandal, or when the occasional 
misconduct of public officials is promptly dis- 
covered and punished; when the burdens of 
taxation are fairly distributed and cause no more 
than a normal amount of grumble ; when police 
and fire departments are conducted squarely and 
efficiently; when the health department shows 
results in a low and diminishing death rate, and 
epidemics are few and of brief duration; when 
water, light, and transportation may be had with 
no large percentage of exasperation over and 
above the ordinary cost of service. 

Add to this a city's pride in its public parks, 
its children's play-grounds, its well-paved and 
shaded streets, in the architectural excellence of 
its public and private buildings, including sani- 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 31 

tary regulation of the homes of the very poor — 
and we have a fair stock on which to grow those 
spiritual graces which are the finest flower of the 
city's life. 

After all the rest is said, the crowning glory of 
any city is its men, who make every other excel- 
lence possible. Who are its eminent lawyers and 
judges ? Are they men of more than ordinary 
learning and insight and power to carry a con- 
vincing argument ? Rave they persuasiveness of 
speech backed by a mastery of large affairs and of 
legal and moral principles ? Are there among its 
physicians and surgeons men of unusual skill ? 
Are its ministers of religion men of great devo- 
tion and great eloquence, wise in the spiritual 
concerns of their age and foremost in good works ? 
Have its artists painted pictures and its authors 
written books that are a gain to the whole wide 
world ? Are there in it men and women of lar^re 
philanthropy who have skill to make their benefi- 
cence actually help toward self-help and self- 
respect, instead of breeding up new pauperism 
for others to relieve ? Are its social leaders 
women of that fine and kindly grace that strength- 
ens and purifies while it delights and entertains ? 
And what of the public spirit of the city's men of 
affairs ? Have they large thought for the public 
good, beyond their private concerns ? We have 
had notable examples in our day of cities whose 
business men showed the power of pulling to- 



32 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

gether in any great public concern, and the lack 
of that power and spirit has been to the discredit 
of other communities. It is bad for the self- 
respect of a city to look upon the ruins of any 
great public enterprise which has failed for lack 
of wide co-operation. 

The public press of a city may be one chief 
source of the city's pride. We have seen exam- 
ples in which a town of relatively small popula- 
tion has for long years influenced public opinion 
far and near through the daily issues of a news- 
paper edited with unusual ability. And in our 
more populous cities the influence of the news- 
paper press is a large element in municipal great- 
ness. So, too, a city takes pride in the influence 
and general sagacity of its leaders in political 
life. Under our American system, every remotest 
district of the land shares in the government 
of the state and in the national government 
at Washington, in the persons of some of its 
chosen citizens. A city may well lift up its 
head, when from its people men are designated 
to bear the largest responsibility in state and 
national affairs and in representing this nation in 
its dealings with foreign powers. The glory of 
cities is their men of righteousness and strength, 
and it is good for a city to do them honor so long 
as their strength holds fast by righteousness. In 
some communities the position of ** leader of 
the bar," accorded by common consent, is held 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 33 

almost as definitely as the position of mayor of 
the city, and for a longer term. And there are 
communities, even cities of the larger class, that 
recognize in like manner their "foremost citi- 
zen," and claim him as a public good, however 
private his manner of life may be. 

Finally, in this enumeration, we must mention 
among the grounds of a city's pride those long- 
standing organizations of men which may claim 
the dignified title of institution. There are its 
churches, each with a half -private history of its 
own, but each in its own way carrying the gleam 
of eternal aspiration through the fabric of the 
city's life. There are its hospitals, its benevolent 
and fraternal and industrial organizations, its 
libraries, its music and dramatic art. Shake- 
speare, a symphony orchestra, and a circulating 
library are pretty shrewd tests of the civiliza- 
tion of cities. 

The most significant of institutional tests ap- 
pears in the state of public education. Our peo- 
ple are generally ready to declare the praise of 
their public schools. It is well that this should 
be so, and the schools are generally worthy of 
their confidence. But unfortunately there are no 
readily applicable standards by which the public 
can discriminate between what is wholly worthy 
of praise in the schools and what is chiefly 
in need of improvement. One indication, cer- 
tainly, of excellence in a system of public educa- 



S4 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

tion is its ability to hold the attendance of pupils 
beyond the earliest grades; and its provision of 
a succession of well-ordered and closely connected 
schools, one above the other, by which the way 
has been made clear and direct, for the poor as 
well as for the rich, up into the highest ranges 
of education which their natural abilities may 
fit them to reach. In this community we have 
the unusual example of a city system of schools 
carried forward till it culminates in a city 
university. 

There are two influences which are working 
side by side throughout the land for the making 
of a higher civilization. They are the influence 
of cities and the influence of universities. The 
ideals of these two are not the same. Not in- 
frequently they must antagonize each other. At 
other times each is supplemented or even rein- 
forced by the other. The standard of the uni- 
versity represents the noblest things in our literary 
inheritance and our philosophy. It stands for 
the highest development, the continuous devel- 
opment, of pure science; and in our American 
educational system it has come almost equally 
to stand for the best attainments in the applied 
sciences. There is promise that in future it 
will join art to science, and so greatly enlarge its 
purpose and its influence. Already the begin- 
ning of this movement of the fine arts toward 
affiliation with the universities is seen, and we 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 35 

may confidently expect that the movement will 
go on without interruption. In literature, in 
philosophy, in natural science, the university 
stands for pure devotion to truth, without a 
thought of gain or of any extraneous advantage. 
Its moral purpose is expressed in sheer, unself- 
ish devotion to the public good as furthered by 
an unswerving search for truth. 

The life of the city, on the other hand, involves 
the employment of the most concrete and power- 
ful forces, material and economic. It makes of 
wealth and man's ambition a kind of universal 
instrument of its activities. But its foremost 
characteristic is its concentration of human 
intercourse. It sharpens the faculties of men by 
insistent opposition of ideas ; but it also teaches 
men urbanity, an open-minded appreciation of 
the differing tastes and standards of many and 
diverse minds. It sets, moreover, a standard of 
its own in the meeting of men with men, a stand- 
ard of social manner and common courtesy. 
Its moral purpose is seen in the effort to find the 
best ways of varied co-operation with one's fel- 
low men, for the furtherance of the common 
good. 

There is nothing more vital in our modern 
life than the interaction of these two ideals — 
the academic freedom of the university and the 
efficient cosmopolitanism of the city. 

Wherever a great university is located in a 



36 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

great center of population the two types of in- 
fluence meet and mingle in ways that are full 
of significance. But where the two are bound 
together so intimately as in this community, 
where the university is part of the public system 
of education and the crowning member of that 
system, there is opportunity for peculiarly fruit- 
ful relations between them. The university is 
at once an added mark of civic distinction and 
an agency deliberately erected by the city to 
influence and possibly to recast the ideals and 
purposes of the city's life. What, under these 
circumstances, have they a right to expect each 
from the other .^ And in the first place, what 
may the university expect from the city which it 
adorns ? 

I can speak only as an inquirer into general 
educational movements and not as one having 
any intimate knowledge of the local situation 
here in Cincinnati. From this point of view, 
it would seem that the university may expect the 
city to understand its place and purpose, to hold 
it in the foremost rank among the objects of 
civic pride, and to give it the moral and financial 
support that it needs for the attainment of the 
highest academic ideals. The purpose to be a 
full modern university is a high ambition and 
more difliicult of attainment than can be readily 
appreciated. For the modern university reaches 
out over many fields of knowledge. In the most 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 37 

of those fields the best equipment, in books and 
apparatus, is costly and must be frequently re- 
newed. A university, too, must have chiefly 
men: men of such eminence in their several 
fields that they are known in the great world of 
scholarship; men who are growing by research 
and becoming better known from year to year; 
men of such devotion to science and to the public 
good that they are an honor and an asset of 
great worth to any community to which they 
may belong. Such men are in demand in the 
university world. There are not enough of 
them to supply the need. The utmost care in 
the selection of such men and care to hold them 
when they have been attached to the university 
are among the first requisites in the management 
of such an institution. Every university rightly 
desires to have in its faculty at least one or two 
men, or more, who are the recognized leaders 
of the world in their several departments. 

The relation of a city university to the city 
system of schools adds emphasis to considera- 
tions such as these. It is to be a drawing force 
which shall lure young people of promise up 
into those grades of study in which their talents 
may expand and reach their fit employment. It 
is to set high the standard of scholarship and 
of training for efficiency. The community should 
understand the greatness of this service and 
should turn the powerful forces that it has always 



38 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

at command to the support of the institution 
which renders such service. 

What, in turn, may the city expect from the 
university? It may expect that every pupil in 
every one of its primary schools and higher 
schools will be better taught, and will receive 
more of stimulus to higher things, for what the 
university has to give. It may expect that the 
hard commercialism of city life will be relieved 
by association with pure devotion to science 
and things of the spirit. It may expect that 
its reputation will be enhanced and men shall 
find it a better place to live because the univer- 
sity is there. It may expect that the other things 
which make for its honor and the higher life, its 
libraries, its museums, its music and all of the 
arts, its institutions of religion and philanthropy, 
will all receive manifold reinforcement and bet- 
terment, direct and indirect, from those influ- 
ences which the university shall in time send 
forth. 

And this is not all. For the city and the uni- 
versity must each react upon the other. The 
industrial needs of the community will give 
stimulus and direction to activities of the uni- 
versity. Pure science will be brought home to 
the processes of daily life. Your factories will 
do better work and make profit from the saving 
of what now goes to waste, because of better 
machines and methods and better men that the 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 39 

schools will provide to meet the present need. 
The best commercial experience will be gath- 
ered up by the university and be organized into 
courses of training, and from those courses of 
training men and women will go forth to carry 
the better methods everywhere. Teachers trained 
in this university and in other universities will 
carry the higher culture and the spirit of scientific 
improvement into all of the elementary schools 
and so into all of the city's homes. Through 
such activities as these, the university will break 
through the isolation which has too often 
shrouded institutions of learning and will give 
itself frankly and freely to a real participation in 
the real life of the city. The outlook to such 
reciprocal relations between these two great, 
formative influences in modern civilization is 
encouraging and inspiring. The modern uni- 
versity is almost a city in itself. The modern 
city is responding to university influences. And 
when a great community assumes direction of a 
great institution of learning, it cannot fail to edu- 
cate itself in the very endeavor to understand 
and to maintain the higher education. 

One thing in particular I should like to say 
to the men of the University of Cincinnati, and 
one thing to the members of this graduating 
class. As a friend and brother, let me charge 
you, of the University, as I would charge the 
members of any university : Hold fast to the aca- 
demic ideal of pure devotion to truth. You are 



40 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

seeking to bring the university into the closest 
touch with the city's varied needs. And that is 
well. It is clearly the work for universities in 
this day, and untold good is to come from that 
work. But while doing this work, leave not 
the other undone. Your most effective service, 
your most practical service, depends ultimately 
upon your steadfast devotion to pure scholarship 
and scientific ideals. Do not lower any scientific 
standard for the sake of popularity. Do not let 
zeal for immediate commercial applications di- 
minish your zeal in the pursuit of truth for its 
own sake. Your strength and influence and your 
ability to serve are all bound up with your essen- 
tial loyalty to the abiding spirit of the true uni- 
versity. Such loyalty is a thing hard to achieve 
and desperately hard to maintain, but it is your 
very life. 

I have no reason to believe that special ex- 
hortation is needed here; but is not the need a 
present need and the danger of defection a 
present danger everywhere, because of the very 
loftiness and severity of the ideal ? 

And you, young men and women of this class, 
let me charge you that from the university you 
carry into the life of the city a lasting devotion to 
the things that make for the city's good name. 
The true ideals of the university and the higher 
ideals of the city are in harmony with each other, 
and the city can greatly extend and enlarge the 
education given you by the university. But 



THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 41 

there are lower ideals of city life with which the 
true university spirit must wage incessant war- 
fare, and I hope you will wage that warfare by 
direct participation in the political and social 
affairs of the city. The great enemies are indif- 
ference and cynicism. When men try to per- 
suade you that the improvement of the life of the 
city and the progressive wiping-out of evils is all 
an academic dream, be fully assured that you are 
tempted of the devil. The merit system in the 
public service, the attempt to improve the condi- 
tion of the very poor, the striving after a better 
understanding between capital and labor, and all 
other urgent questions in the life of our munici- 
palities — the true university spirit has something 
to offer toward the solution of these problems. 
But if the problems were easy there would be no 
need of the university spirit in dealing with them 
and no need of your giving them a thought. It 
is exactly because they are hard, and because 
men say that nothing can be done, and because 
university ideals are held to be quixotic and 
powerless in the face of such real difficulties, 
that you who have caught the university spirit 
should enter the struggle and stay with it to the 
end. If university graduates will fight it out 
along that line in all the cities of our land, it will 
appear that there is nothing better for the self- 
respect of cities than the things that universities 
have to give. 



Ill 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICUI^ 
TURAL EDUCATION 

An Address delivered at the Fiftieth Anniversary Exercises 
of the Michigan Agricultural College^ at Lansing, 
Michigan, as Part of the Proceedings of the Twenty- 
first Annual Convention of the Association of American 
Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, May 
30, 1907. Published in Bulletin 196 of the office of 
Experiment Stations, United States Department of Agri- 
culture f December 10, 1907. 



Ill 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL 
EDUCATION 

THE pioneer farmers of America had a 
double interest in life. First and fore- 
most, they were pioneers, with all of 
the dangers and excitements of that pioneer life. 
Secondarily, they were farmers. It was hard 
and rude and unskillful, the farming in which 
they were engaged, but it gave them the neces- 
saries of life. When the first dull opposition of 
nature was overcome, when cabins had been 
built and woodlands cleared and the plow had 
in some way done its first work, the soil showed 
itself responsive and fertile enough. For a time, 
at least, life was easier. But the zest of pioneer- 
ing was gone, and the more adventurous of our 
people soon moved on to the West, where they 
might feel the thin edge of civilization still cutting 
its earliest way through raw nature and barba- 
rism, and know that that keen edge was their 
own life and endeavor. The farmers who re- 
mained behind were now farmers only and no 
longer pioneers. They saw the first rank fertil- 



46 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ity of the soil fall back into more moderate 
bounds. Their life became tame and binding. 
New wants arose with the rise of new social 
relations. A few in every community were 
able, by insight and energy, to keep still in the 
front of things in that new age, but for many 
the occupation which made up the greater part 
of their life had become an unpromising, unin- 
spiring, unenlightened servitude. In this jubi- 
lee, to-day, we are to recall the ways in which 
new zest has been brought into the depressed 
life of the American farmer, the ways in which 
his farm has been made part of a new frontier 
and he has been made once more a pioneer. 

At first the improvement of our husbandry 
was the work of a few men, and these were men 
whose interest in farming was, in large part, a 
public interest. George Washington was one 
of the earliest and one of the most influential 
of these. First in war and first in peace, he was 
also the first American farmer of his day. His 
outlook over the educational needs of the new 
nation included proposals for the establishment 
of boards of agriculture, a military academy, 
and a national university. Other statesmen 
with a care for agriculture and other farmers 
who were statesmen in their view, urged that 
practical provision be made for the collection 
and dissemination of agricultural information. 
In the opinion of these men it was information 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 47 

that was chiefly needed to insure the general 
improvement of the farming industry — informa- 
tion regarding the experience and experiments 
of those who were already most advanced in the 
practice of husbandry. The new awakening 
in European agriculture had great influence 
among the leaders of American agriculture at 
this time. 

It was while we were still under the Articles 
of Confederation that a beginning was made in 
the formation of agricultural societies. Pennsyl- 
vania and South Carolina had established such 
societies before the adoption of the Constitution. 
New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut fol- 
lowed during Washington's administration. The 
publications of these societies had begun to ap- 
pear before the close of the eighteenth century, 
and agricultural fairs came into being in the first 
decades of the nineteenth century. Various 
endeavors to secure the establishment of a na- 
tional board of agriculture had led, before the 
day that we here celebrate, to the first seed dis- 
tributions through the national Patent Office, 
and to the first separate agricultural appropria- 
tion, in 1854. 

Through these several movements, supple- 
mented by a comparatively early development of 
an agricultural periodical literature, and through 
many later developments of agricultural organiza- 
tion, the growth of interest in the improvement of 



48 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

rural conditions has long been actively fostered. 
But our attention to-day must be centered upon 
the development of organized agricultural educa- 
tion, and to that subject we will turn without any 
further delay. 

Let us first note some bearings of agricultural 
education which have often been discussed, but 
must be considered here again in the interest of 
true educational perspective. Historically it has 
been found extremely difficult to bring the sub- 
ject of agriculture into any manageable peda- 
gogic form. The fact that everybody in the 
country knows something about it is at first a 
hindrance rather than a help. It is difficult to 
treat the subject in such manner as to avoid on 
the one hand an excess of platitude, a repetition 
of what every one knows, or thinks he knows, and 
on the other hand an excess of unutilized natural 
science, deeply interesting in itself but hard to 
apply on the farm. Certain other subjects, of 
which education itself is one, share in this handi- 
cap. It is a difficulty met with in European 
schools of agriculture, and it had not been over- 
come in Europe or America when the Michigan 
State Agricultural College came into being. The 
most effective training for manual occupations 
was still some form of apprenticeship, apart 
from schools, while the school had long held the 
foremost place in preparation for literary pur- 
suits. How to combine, in one educative process. 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 49 

the advantages of the school and the advantages 
of the apprentice system, was the problem of 
agricultural education. In one form or another 
it has been the problem of all our education for 
special occupations in the past half-century. 

For the student of educational history, then, 
this problem of agricultural education appears 
as one phase, and a peculiarly difficult phase, of 
the larger problem of training for any particular 
vocation in life. You will not look to me to con- 
tribute anything to the special history of this 
institution, which others, here on the ground, 
may be expected to treat so much more effectively 
than I could treat it. But my theme deals rather 
with that broader movement of which the notable 
history of this institution forms a part. 

It would be difficult to say just where and how 
systematic instruction in the principles of agri- 
culture took its rise in this country. Such instruc- 
tion was given in some sort in Moor's Indian 
School, out of which Dartmouth College arose, 
back even in colonial days. Benjamin Franklin 
proposed such instruction for the academy at 
Philadelphia, the forerunner of the University of 
Pennsylvania, but it does not appear that this 
part of his plan was realized. In the twenties 
and thirties of the nineteenth century great in- 
terest was excited in the so-called manual labor 
schools. It was proposed that a farm be attached 
to the schools, and that those who were studying 

4 



50 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

during a part of the day should engage in ordi- 
nary farm labor during another part of the day. 
The purpose, to be sure, was primarily to offer 
students an opportunity to "pay their way" 
through school. But there was a thought, too, 
of instruction in the better methods of farming, 
and at least a vague dream of something better 
yet, the vital union of thought and manual toil. 
Some of the old-line colleges showed at least 
good- will toward the scientific aspects of agricul- 
ture. Columbia even established a professorship 
under which agriculture was ranged alongside of 
other sciences. Then, just at the middle of the 
century, the state of Michigan provided in its 
constitution of 1850 for the establishment of an 
agricultural school, and seven years later this 
institution, the first of its kind and grade in the 
United States, was ready to enroll its first stu- 
dents. Pennsylvania had already incorporated 
its Farmers' High School, but it was preceded by 
two years in the actual opening by this State 
Agricultural College of Michigan. A little later 
in that same notable year, 1857, Justin S. 
Morrill of Vermont first introduced in Congress 
his measure for the endowment of agricultural 
and mechanical colleges in the several states by 
the national government. 

What is especially worthy of note at this point 
is the fact that this movement, which was pri- 
marily a movement of the people or rather of the 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 51 

leaders of the people, found parallel embodiment 
in both state and national legislation. At first 
both the states and the nation moved but slowly 
and tentatively. But within a few years large 
beginnings had been made. In this as in other 
public interests, within the broad limitations of 
the national Constitution, working adjustments 
of state and national agencies to each other have 
been made from time to time, in view of practical 
needs rather than of academic theories. 

The great, epoch-making act of this whole 
movement was undoubtedly the Morrill act, 
which finally reached its passage when civil war 
had lent new power to the spirit of nationality in 
the national legislature. In signing this act, on 
the second day of July, 1862, Abraham Lincoln, 
that "new birth of our new soil," that surveyor 
of western lands, who was to bring to an end the 
labor of slaves on our American fields, took his 
decisive part in the effort to make our American 
tillage the work of men made free by knowledge 
and enlightened skill. 

By the Morrill act of 1862, the national gov- 
ernment gave aid to the states, in the way of 
liberal grants of lands; it encouraged the states 
to do in their own several ways the work of higher 
education in the domain of agriculture and the 
mechanic arts. While technical studies were 
brought to the front in this act, it refused to draw 
a line of opposition between those technical sub- 



52 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

jects and the training which makes for liberal 
culture. And both technical and liberal training 
were joined with military instruction, as prepara- 
tion for the defence of the nation's life. 

Other important acts soon followed: That 
establishing a national department of agricul- 
ture, in 1862, which department was raised to 
cabinet rank in 1889; and that establishing a 
department of education, in 1867, which depart- 
ment was reduced to the rank of a bureau in 
1869. In their different ways these two govern- 
ment offices have both had to do with the ad- 
ministration of the later acts for agricultural 
education, and I think I may add that on their 
effective co-operation depends the full realization 
in the future of the high purposes for which 
those acts were passed. 

After the Civil War the establishment of agri- 
cultural colleges went steadily forward till such 
institutions, aided by the land grants of the gen- 
eral government, had been erected in all of the 
states, with eventually sixteen schools for colored 
students added in the southern states. The 
association of these colleges was organized, the 
Hatch acts brought new aid from the general 
government for the maintenance of experiment 
stations, the second Morrill act added its large 
federal appropriations for the furtherance of the 
ordinary work of the colleges, the summer grad- 
uate school was organized, the Adams act pro- 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 53 

vided for advanced research in agriculture, and 
finally the Nelson amendment to the agricultural 
appropriation bill of 1907 has brought still larger 
financial support to the colleges, together with 
permissive provision for the use of a part of the 
federal grant in the training of teachers of agri- 
culture. It is a record of notable advance, and 
we can hardly doubt that the great heart of 
Washington would have been glad to see the re- 
sults that we may see to-day, 

"When we attempt to interpret the course of this 
educational development and to plan for further 
advance, we need the help of some general con- 
ceptions relating to our social organization. For 
it is evident that agricultural education cannot be 
a thing apart and alone. Its real and lasting 
strength is to be found in its connection with 
general education. And the strength of general 
education and of all of its special developments 
is to be found in the connection of the schools 
with the real life of our people. 

Passing over all other views of our democracy, 
however essential and interesting they may be, 
permit me to call attention just now to the func- 
tion of those who are called leaders in a demo- 
cratic society; for we now commonly recognize 
the fact that democracy does not dispense with 
leaders, but rather makes the strongest demand 
for positive leadership. In such a society it is not 
for one individual or one class simply to lead 



54 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

while another class simply follows. The true 
leader in a democracy is one who, while leading 
in all reality, is capable of learning from his fol- 
lowers. And the followers of such a leader in a 
true democracy are not those who follow^ because 
they do not think, but those who follow because 
they think and are able to recognize their leader. 
They follow because they are convinced. So our 
whole social fabric is made up of leaders who 
must learn if they would continue to lead, and 
their peculiarly restless and skittish constitu- 
encies. Here as everywhere the relation of lead- 
ers to constituencies is permanent and essential, 
but within that permanent relationship there is 
continual interplay and shifting of parts. It is a 
normal condition with us that those who have the 
subordinate part should be increasingly intelli- 
gent, critical, and ready to assume the actual 
leadership. 

This is the state of things that our system of 
education fosters and must continue to foster. 
It must bring forth scientific experts who shall 
be able to teach the people the principles under- 
lying the arts of life, and it must train up a people 
to make for the expert an intelligent constitu- 
ency, quick to seize on all that he may offer for 
the betterment of their practice, and quick to 
reject those suggestions that they cannot put to 
use. So our public health rests upon the co- 
operation of highly trained expeiLs in medicine 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 55 

and sanitation and a people who can act intelli- 
gently upon their directions and regulations. So 
our public and domestic architecture is im- 
proving slowly — very slowly — through the co- 
operation of architects who know their art and 
a building people who know their architects, and 
who follow them in part and frustrate them in 
part. So, too, our agricultural education must 
proceed. There must be training of the highest 
sort for our agricultural experts. More than that, 
at the topmost reach of our agricultural education 
there must be that which is not commonly recog- 
nized as education at all, the pure research of the 
pure scientist. For no education can continue 
to be really alive unless it draw directly, from 
some source of new and abounding knowledge, 
a fresh supply, never yet handled and made com- 
mon among mankind. It may be very little that 
any year or any age may have to give that is 
altogether new, but that little will sweeten all 
the rest. 

Then, our system of education must reach 
down to schools of the lowest grade, the little 
country schools, in which the capable constitu- 
ency of the great experts is to be trained; and 
there, too, some of the future leaders are to make 
their first beginnings. The most of those in such 
schools are to live by the practical art of farming. 
But in these days they are to have the skill to 
take the science of the scientist and transform it 



56 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

into the art of their lives. They are to read 
agricultural bulletins and understand and use 
them. They are to pick their way and keep from 
being mired in the mass of such literature now 
provided for their reading. They are to attend 
institutes and conventions, where they will listen 
with discrimination to long and learned papers, 
and make short and pertinent speeches of their 
own. They are to find the farm interesting in the 
highest degree, because of new hopes of profitable 
production which it offers and because of its 
connection with the great world of ideas. 

When we grow more skillful, we shall make 
elementary schools of a better-rounded type, in 
which the book-learning that has long been the 
distinctive province of the school shall join to 
itself the best things in the old system of appren- 
ticeship, and from that combination shall arise 
something better than either one in its lonesome 
isolation. Already we are beginning to make 
institutions somewhat of this order, and it will be 
done much better yet as time goes on. 

This, then, is what we may see as the ideal, in 
agricultural education and equally in education 
of other kinds, and perhaps of every kind : A 
system of schools complete in its sequence from 
the lowest to the highest, in which the study of 
books is closely joined with training for some of 
the practical arts of life; in which all practical 
training is kept in vital touch with general edu- 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 57 

cation; in which the ability to form sound and 
stable judgments is sought throughout as a thing 
of great price ; in which the higher schools send 
into the lower schools an unbroken succession of 
teachers who both know the truth and are able 
to bring others to a knowledge of the truth ; and 
in which, finally, the stream of knowledge fresh 
and new, from some department of pure research, 
shall never fail to keep fresh and bright the old 
wisdom of the ages gone before. Or, in more 
concrete statement, our elementary schools and 
high schools in country communities are still to 
be primarily schools of general education, but 
with much more of training in the arts of the 
farm, and the sciences lying near to those arts; 
our state colleges of agriculture and mechanic 
arts are to prepare young men and young women 
to read intelligently the literature of scientific 
agriculture, to form independent judgments in 
agricultural matters, and to bring their new 
knowledge into connection with the real work of 
the farm; these state colleges, moreover, are to 
provide well-trained teachers of agriculture and 
related subjects for the elementary and secon- 
dary schools; the colleges of agriculture, still 
further, are to be co-operative educational in- 
stitutions and not merely special and local insti- 
tutions — they are to co-operate with similar 
institutions in other states, in order that the work 
of one may be strengthened by the work of all. 



58 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

and co-operate with the universities of their sev- 
eral states for the innumerable advantages to 
both which may come from such united effort. 
The national Department of Agriculture is un- 
doubtedly to continue its remarkably wide and 
influential work, its expert investigations, the is- 
suance of its manifold and vastly useful publi- 
cations, and its furtherance of all manner of 
agricultural education and research in the sev- 
eral states. Finally, the Bureau of Education is 
to do as thoroughly as possible the part of this 
work assigned to it. I venture the hope that with 
enlarged resources it may do more than it is now 
expected to do, and all without trespassing on 
the proper field of other institutions. 

Let me speak a little more particularly of the 
part of this program which falls to the education 
oflfice of the general government. It can do its 
best work, I think, as a co-ordinating influence. 
It can bring to the notice of the less favored in- 
stitutions information concerning the experience 
of more advanced institutions. It can call atten- 
tion from time to time to the relation of agricul- 
tural education to general education. It can 
survey the educational field and possibly point 
out dangers to be averted or weak places to be 
strengthened. It can, finally, discover things 
that need the doing and are not attended to by 
any other agency, and can see that some part of 
such lack is supplied. So much as this I hope the 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 59 

Bureau of Education may be able to do for our 
agricultural education. And so much as this I 
may say it will undertake to do as far as its re- 
sources will permit. 

In conclusion, the view cannot be too strongly 
stressed that all of this agricultural education is a 
contribution to the general education of the 
American people and to the betterment of Ameri- 
can life. You who celebrate the fiftieth anniver- 
sary of this institution realize, as the history of 
this college has shown, that it is not simply larger 
crops and better breeds of stock and a more 
profitable output of farm manufacture for which 
you are laboring ; but through these means and 
through all other interests of the modern farm 
you are working for the improvement of Ameri- 
can citizenship, and that with special reference to 
the needs of this great state of Michigan. May 
you long continue to serve the Commonwealth 
and the larger Republic as faithfully and as suc- 
cessfully as you now serve them. And may every 
good cause in this land feel the reinforcement of a 
wholesome and vigorous life in the homes of our 
country communities, which have been made 
more prosperous homes and better homes because 
of the work that you are doing here. 



IV 

SOME RELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS 

EDUCATION AND SECULAR 

EDUCATION 

Read at the Conference of the Religious Education Associa- 
tion at Los Angeles, California, July 10, 1907. Pub- 
lished in Religious Education, October, 1907. 



IV 



SOME RELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
AND SECULAR EDUCATION 

RELIGIOUS education cannot perma- 
nently employ methods which are out of 
^ harmony with the methods of secular 
education. Those methods may differ with the 
different subjects to which they are applied, but 
they cannot permanently contradict each other. 
The one will gradually assimilate the other. 
And the one that will assimilate the other, in any 
age, is the one that in that age has the wider 
hold on the convictions of men. 

The relation of these tw^o, each to each, varies 
and must vary from age to age. In the mediaeval 
period it was institutional religion that exercised 
the wider sway, and secular education, if such it 
could be called, departed only occasionally or 
furtively from the ways of religious education. 
Now it is natural science that commands the 
more nearly unanimous assent of mankind. 
Science represents the united thought of our 
modern world, and modern education is allied 
with modern science. It is this type of education 



64 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

that is dominant to-day, and we may confidently 
expect that in this age it will in large measure 
assimilate religious education to its standards 
and its processes. ^'■ 

The march of education, having this scientific 
and secular character, is one of the mightiest 
spectacles of our modern world. It is the central 
and unifying fact of modern civilization. The 
religion of this age is cleft by innumerable differ- 
ences of faith and polity; that is, for the time 
being, it is normally and necessarily sectarian. 
There are seeming exceptions, but they will not 
disprove the rule. The science of this age is the 
same science all over the world. And modern 
education, overpassing partisan and sectarian 
bounds, overpassing even local, national, and 
racial bounds, is fast coming to be in its main 
features the same throughout the world, and to 
constitute one dominant, world-wide, human in- 
terest. Der Glaube trennt die Volker, die Wissen- 
schaft vereinigt sie. 

We cannot doubt that this age of sectarianism 
has a part of its own to play in the religious his- 
tory of the nations. If it is a peculiarly unstable 
and transitional stage in the life of the church, 
it may be no less important to the rounding out 
of that life into its fulness than any other stage 
through which the church has passed. But so 
long as religion is predominantly sectarian, it 
may not expect to regain its ascendency over 



RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 65 

the institutions and the methods of education. 
Universal education gravitates toward universal 
knowledge and toward universally recognized 
forms of thought. The partial and unprevailing 
view of any party q^ sect is not at home in public 
schools, even though it be a view which shall 
eventually lead the world. Religion in its mod- 
ern relations, sectarian religion, is a breeder of 
disturbance in those national systems of educa- 
tion in which it now holds a place in accordance 
with a tradition all unconsciously outgrown. 
Disturbance is often wholesome, but not disturb- 
ance of this kind ; for it is full of bitterness, and 
often it appeals to simple prejudice. Such dis- 
turbance doubtless w^ill continue, working some 
little good and any amount of harm, till the 
tradition which sustained the official teaching of 
religion among those peoples shall be cast aside. 
Where the tradition has already passed away or 
where it has never become established, the teach- 
ing of any system of religious doctrine is to 
be steadily excluded from public and common 
schools. Formal instruction in religion will be 
out of place in public schools w^herever and so 
long as religion is sectarian, wherever and so 
long as the method of religious teaching is 
greatly at variance with the methods of secular 
education. 

And will the time ever come when these limi- 
tations will no longer prevail? I am not a 

5 



66 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

prophet, but I have no doubt that such a time 
will come — not in our day, but in the course 
of generations or of centuries. The topmost 
crest of the sectarian wave in our religious history 
would seem already to be past. It is a wave 
centuries long and it may be ages long, but it is 
a receding wave. Men still emphasize their 
religious differences ; but already there is notable 
gain in the emphasis of religious agreement. It 
is a change that points toward a day w^hen secta- 
rian distinctions shall be decisively subordinated 
to religious affirmations as wide as undegenerate 
mankind. The differences will not disappear, 
and agreement will not be attained by the mere 
cancellation of differences. But the differences 
wall, I think, become subordinate and tributary. 
And, by ways that none but a prophet can fore- 
see, by revivals of religious thought and power 
such as the w^orld has not yet known, the spirit 
of man will come to new convictions of religious 
verity, and they will be wider and deeper than 
the unities of the past. 

We cannot doubt it, for we believe that religion 
as well as science stands for a permanent need 
of the human soul, and stands in truth for the 
supreme need of the human soul. As long as 
our temporal incompleteness brings its manifold 
strain upon the life within us, so long we shall 
find ourselves stricken with need of some eternal 
perfectness. And the religion which answers 



RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 67 

to this need will be either the conscious and 
dominant interest of our lives or the large back- 
ground of our lives; unless it be indeed in 
occasional conditions of disease, sporadic or 
epidemic, where for a time the sense for religion 
may seem to be altogether lost — yet only for a 
time. 

But in education and religion, as in all things 
else, no age is final and complete. Every age 
must do its part in preparation for the next, it 
must contribute its part to the whole of human 
history. Yet, if the conditions of this age are 
not permanent, they are permanent and impera- 
tive for this age. Let us now look a little further 
into present-day relations of education and re- 
ligion, viewing them as a stage in the long-con- 
tinued development of such relations — a process 
that has run through ages that have been and 
must run through the ages to come — yet as 
having a certain immediate finality for the times 
in which we live. 

So far as modern education is concerned, we 
see that it is allied not only with modern science 
but with democracy. Even in monarchical lands 
this is true, in subtle ways that are very wide 
in their reach. In our own land the alliance 
between education and democracy is open and 
absolute. Our secular education, as both demo- 
cratic and scientific, finds its greatest elevation, 
it makes its warmest claim to the devotion of 



68 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

men, on the moral plane. Democratic education 
seeks the good of every man because he is man, 
and so reaches its high moral conception of 
social service. Scientific education teaches men 
to follow truth for the sake of truth, in the full 
conviction that human interests and clear truth 
must in the end be one. In its pure devotion to 
truth, natural science is moral, unswervingly 
moral. The best that education draws from the 
scientific alliance is not even the perfected method 
which science has to teach, but its moral eleva- 
tion, its power to awaken a new devotion to truth. 
In loyalty to truth and in disinterested social 
service our public education rises to the summit 
of its power. 

What, then, is the character of religion, in this 
age of sectarianism, which may call for special 
consideration at this point ? 

Religion is not only a permanent human fact, 
but certain of its aspects and elements can be 
distinguished as likewise abiding through his- 
toric change. Consider the aspects of doctrine, 
of ritual, of institutional organization, and of 
ethical spirit, not to mention others at this time. 
The student of ecclesiastical history knows how 
indissolubly these are bound together; but he 
knows also that in the history of the Christian 
church now one and now another has held the 
dominant place. Such shifting from age to age 
of the center of gravity of religion is of the deep- 



RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 69 

est significance in the history of the higher life 
of mankind. 

In the rehgious thought of these present times 
we see a turning away from the doctrinal and 
the ecclesiastical elements that laid a strong hold 
on the minds of men in other days. Within the 
church the interest in these things is languid as 
compared with that of an earlier age. And we 
cannot forget that a great part of the religious 
aspiration and emotion of our day arises outside 
of the church. It will not be contained in the 
old dogmatic and institutional forms. It has 
not made new forms for itself, and, in truth, it 
does not much care to make new forms. Yet 
that is not to deny to it altogether the religious 
character. It is an overflow religion. For the 
most part it may be recognized as an overflow 
Christianity. 

Now, if there are no institutional forms and no 
systematic theology that have succeeded in gath- 
ering up and unifying this overflow of religion, 
it does, in fact, find some internal unification, 
which makes of it one tendency and not many 
unrelated tendencies. And that unifying prin- 
ciple is humanitarian and ethical. 

Even in the church, and particularly in the 
Protestant churches, it would seem that the 
turning away from those earlier centers of reli- 
gious conviction, the system of doctrine and ec- 
clesiastical polity, were to work out as a definite 



70 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

turning to a center of moral conviction. But 
not moral as touching mere practice according 
to customary standards. It is rather the moral 
as essential righteousness with which we are 
here concerned. And again, not righteousness as 
a term in a system of theology, but righteousness 
as apprehended by the large human sense which 
values the right above the wrong, and that 
overwhelmingly. 

Already the signs of such new centering of 
religion clearly appear. For many in this present 
age, religion is reached by way of the moral 
sense, rather than morals by the way of religion. 
It is not that the historic authority, the miracles, 
the incense of religion, bring men to religious 
convictions, which thereafter are the ground of 
all of their moral convictions; but it is rather 
that through the moral sense, through hunger 
after righteousness, they find a moral universe 
in which the all-righteous God is their Father. 

It is not to be supposed that this new cen- 
tering of the religious life is the ultimate term of 
our religious development, any more than those 
earlier centerings have been. It has its dangers 
and inadequacies, as they had. Other centers, 
perhaps those that the past has known, but in 
new form and heightened power, must send 
forth a corrective influence in their turn when 
this age has done its work. But this age, I think, 
must work out its religious advance, a great and 



RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 71 

true advance from the point at which it began, 
by reaHzing the full meaning of those moral con- 
ceptions which have taken strong hold upon it. 

We have come now to a point where it will 
appear that, for the sake of religion itself — 
in order that religion may do its proper work 
— education must be true to its proper character 
for the age that it serves. The most vital meet- 
ing place for education and religion in this age is 
on the moral plane. Through its new emphasis 
on moral conceptions, education itself, secular 
education if you would call it such, may help 
religion to work its way through and overcome 
its present-day sectarianism. Education will be 
the best ally of religion in this age if it hold true 
to its alliance with science and democracy. 

Observe how vitally the several lines converge. 
Democracy stands for the brotherhood of man. 
Religion bases that brotherhood on what is 
ultimately a more cohesive and organic concep- 
tion, the Fatherhood of God. But where an 
earlier age found the brotherhood of man through 
the fatherhood of God, this age seems destined 
to find the fatherhood of God through the broth- 
erhood of man. Pure devotion to truth is found 
in both religion and science. Historically, the 
religious sense for truth appears as a very differ- 
ent thing from the scientific sense for truth. 
They seem, indeed, to antagonize and cancel 
each other. Yet farther down they are at one. 



72 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

And from that farther depth, below the roots of 
the everlasting hills, their unity must arise into 
the day of human history. 

If this be a true reading of the signs, the same 
moral conceptions are coming to be the upper- 
most convictions in science, in democracy, and 
in religion. It may not be too much to expect 
that this unity shall some day come to full reali- 
zation, and may we not then find that diverse 
religions have come to unity among themselves 
in this very process of coming into accord with 
democracy and science on the high ground of 
moral conviction ? I am very sure that this will 
not be all ; but I think this may be a part of the 
way by which religion and education shall do 
their work together for this age, and for the ages 
that are to follow. 

For the present, then, we may be content to see 
a large part of mankind making their way, even 
unconsciously, toward a genuine religious faith 
through their moral aspirations and endeavors; 
while we still hold to that ultimate creed that our 
moral life will never come to its best until its 
deepest convictions are joined with hopes and 
affections and beliefs touching some larger and 
more enduring life, the true and eternal life of 
the Spirit. 

Finally, the relationships of modern education 
are to be widened. A too absorbing alliance 
with natural science is to be avoided, even if 



RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 73 

modified by the alliance with democracy. A 
closer alliance with modern art is to be culti- 
vated. At an earlier period, education suffered 
from a too absorbing association with art, par- 
ticularly with literary art. Now new relations 
with the arts are desirable, to correct the 
dangers of the scientific alliance, in its more 
extreme manifestations. 

And art, too, has moral implications which 
are ineradicable. Its narrowest devotees can- 
not isolate it altogether from the rest of life. 
While warring against a too narrow devotion to 
natural science, it meets both science and reli- 
gion on the moral plane, and in some degree it 
mediates their differences. It recognizes values 
as well as facts ; it prizes instinct and the mass 
play of human emotion as well as analysis and 
geometric law ; and — chiefly this — it has can- 
ons which represent the matured experience, the 
chastened pang and rapture, of the race, and 
are not to be disclosed or verified in any 
moment of time by any individual fragment 
of the race. 

When modern education has fully entered 
into this threefold alliance with natural science, 
democracy, and art, its newer, safer, and more 
fruitful alliance with religion will, we doubt not, 
be near at hand and even at the door. 



V 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

An Address delivered at Vanderbilt University, June 15, 
1909. Published in the Methodist Review, September, 
1909. 



V 

THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

THE subject upon which I am to speak 
is either one of the dullest or one of the 
most interesting in all the world. That 
depends upon the point of view of the listener 
and upon the speaker's own interest in what 
he has to say. As everybody knows, the talk 
about morals which may be designated as mor- 
alizing is prosaic and platitudinous to the last 
degree. This is a fact of common knowledge, 
and it sometimes obscures our appreciation of 
another fact, namely, that there is no set of ques- 
tions about which men to-day speak with greater 
warmth than questions of right and wrong. In 
the social circle, at the club, in our public jour- 
nals, to say nothing of courts of justice and 
schools and churches, the thoughts and emotions 
of men are most deeply stirred when discus- 
sion reaches some vital question of wrong and 
righteousness. 

There is substance in questions such as these. 
They are daily food for men and women of 



78 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

force and character and influence. An ancient 
writer told of the blessedness of the man whose 
delight is in the law of the Lord, and added that 
''in His law doth he meditate day and night." 
A fine picture is this of the man who draws his 
strength from familiar converse with high and 
moral themes. "My son," another wise man 
said, '*if thou . . . incline thine ear unto wis- 
dom . . . then shalt thou understand the fear 
of the Lord, . . . then shalt thou understand 
righteousness and judgment and equity." 

So, even at the risk of missing my aim and 
being platitudinous and moralizing after all, I 
purpose speaking directly to the subject of 
morals to-night — to this most inviting subject 
of private and public righteousness. The theme 
is peculiarly inviting when one is face to face 
with a class of university students, for the finest 
personal gains from a university course are 
found in the heightening of one's ability to deal 
with the liighest questions of all, which in large 
measure must always be questions of the ethical 
realm; and a university graduate, always a 
public beneficiary and therefore a debtor to his 
community and state and nation, is expected to 
render public service in the furtherance of public 
morality. 

The very bigness of the theme, however, 
renders it obviously impossible to discuss it in 
this hour in any systematic or comprehensive 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 79 

way. I am sure you would be appalled and 
wearied from the beginning if the speaker were 
to attempt such a task. He is the more free, 
accordingly, to exercise a certain caprice. He 
may select a few topics here and there without 
much order or rationality, merely because he 
would like to say something about them, and 
when he is through with these, he may come to 
an end. With all deference, then, to those heroic 
listeners who would prefer a discussion some 
hours in length with logical heads and sub- 
heads and a rhetorical beginning and end, I 
beg you to let me follow this simpler and less 
exacting way. 

In the first place, then, let us think of the 
moral life as a process of growing better. In 
this view we may indeed be not far from the 
essential character of all true morality. A tree 
that does not grow does not live, and a stationary 
goodness is hardly a possibiUty. We may go a 
step further and say that no man can be good 
except by being better than he is by nature. 
But this putting of the case amounts to pretty 
much the same thing as the other ; for any sort 
of excellence once achieved soon becomes habit 
and second nature, and the only way one can 
then continue to be good is to go on outgrowing 
the virtue which he has already accompHshed. 
Among the most hopeless characters in human 
society is a good man who does not change, 



80 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

whose virtues are wrought out to a finish Uke 
the features of a ruarble statue, a man who 
nevermore will strive and sweat and resist 
temptation even unto blood. We may say the 
same of communities. A highly moral and irre- 
proachable society may, after all, be immoral 
in its stationary complacency. There is better 
hope for genuine righteousness in a changing 
order which is striving after improvement. It 
may run great risk of moral loss for the sake of 
the greater moral gain. There is hope for such 
a community in that its virtues are not to be 
kept under glass but rather to be worked out 
and lived through and then discarded for some- 
thing better. 

Then, there are two sides of morality which 
we should consider, the side of wisdom and the 
side of companionship. One-half of genuine 
morality is ideas. This fact is not to be forgotten, 
particularly when we are under the stress of 
intense convictions or of emotional appeals from 
without. One good half of all morality is wis- 
dom, and therefore it is the duty of every man 
to be wise. I have just been reading over again 
the Imperial Rescript on education which is the 
basis of moral instruction in the schools of Japan, 
and I am struck by the fact that among the stand- 
ards of virtue which it sets up, along with the 
exhortation to *'be filial to your parents, affec- 
tionate to your brothers and sisters," and '*bear 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 81 

yourselves in modesty and moderation," is this 
further exhortation to " pursue learning and cul- 
tivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual 
faculties and perfect moral powers." In many 
v^ays our American standards are different and 
must be different from those of the Japanese, 
but we need no less than they to inculcate as a 
moral duty the obligation to follow after knowl- 
edge. Our righteousness will be a low and un- 
stable value, it will fail us in our time of need, 
unless it be grounded in our most coherent 
thought as well as in our impulses and our 
sentiments. 

There are two ways in which the strain comes 
at its worst in our moral life. One is the sudden 
and unexpected test, the perplexity or tempta- 
tion which arises without warning and must be 
met on the instant. The other is the long-con- 
tinued stress of untoward circumstance which 
wearies out the patience and brings an emotional 
tension to its highest pitch. In both of these 
cases the steadying power of thought is most 
sorely needed. In both of them our thinking in 
the time of need must be largely determined by 
the thinking we may have done before the need 
arose. We cannot school ourselves to right think- 
ing in the very hour of emergency. The schooling 
must have gone before. The emergency is the 
test, the final examination that tries its quality. 
From this point of view the deliberate training 



82 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

of our schools and colleges comes to a higher 
dignity. It is, all the time, preparing for some 
far-off emergency. It is preparing for the exer- 
cise of judgment in some crisis, when passion 
shall claim absolute control. 

I have had other occasion to make note of the 
close connection between the judicial spirit and 
the scientific spirit. To cultivate the scientific 
spirit in the schools is to prepare for the exercise 
of the judicial spirit in the affairs of life. In both 
we have an example of the value of impersonality. 

There is an aspect of human life in which we 
must shake ourselves free from personal con- 
siderations and look upon things objectively and 
impartially. We shall never get the highest good 
out of personality until we have given fair play 
to this impersonality. The judge on the bench 
and the scientist in the laboratory are not to 
be swerved by immediate personal preferences. 
They are seeking the truth which shall stand the 
test of all time and circumstance, and which shall 
therefore serve the personal needs of the world 
and not the personal whims of the passing hour. 
So our education, w^hich shakes us free for the 
time from a thousand little desires, partialities, 
and preferences, from prejudice and partisan- 
ship, is building up within us that judicial spirit 
for which we shall find sore need when we meet 
the instant issues of life. 

But if such wisdom makes one half of our 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 83 

moral life, it is personality that makes the other 
half, the warmer and more exhilarating half. It 
is a part of man's duty to be wise, it is also a part 
of his duty to be companionable. One of the 
brightest of our bright men has said, ''Be good 
and you will be lonesome." It would not be so 
bright but rather more true to say, "If you don't 
get over being lonesome, you can't be more than 
half good." Our ideal of public and private 
virtue is not the ideal of the isolated moralist, who 
would simply instruct his fellow^s and make of 
the community his personally directed kinder- 
garten. It is rather the ideal of the man who 
joins warm hands with his fellow men to go for- 
ward with them in a common cause. 

It is not easy at this point to say exactly the 
right thing and neither more nor less. How shall 
a man keep step with his fellows and yet lead them 
to better things ? How shall he lead them unless 
he be a part of their life, a partisan with them, a 
sectarian with them, a partner of their loves and 
hates, whose aspirations are their own ? It seems 
an insoluble problem, and yet it is the problem 
that the moral leaders of our race have solved. 
Macaulay said of Peter the Great that he civil- 
ized his people and was himself a barbarian. A 
moral leader of to-day will lead his people with- 
out leaving his place in their ranks. 

There are some who will tell you that you can- 
not lead others in the way of improvement if you 



84 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

are too much better than they, that you must 
have some of their vices if you would lead them 
into virtue. And this doctrine easily runs to the 
extreme in which the would-be leader cannot be 
distinguished by any loftiness of his ideals from 
those whom he would lead ; and one short step 
beyond this, the leader falls below the level of 
his followers and becomes indeed a hindrance to 
their progress. It is hard enough to decide in any 
particular case, and it is the particular cases that 
count. I do not think that any man ever finds it 
necessary to be less moral in order that he may 
help his fellow^ men to be more moral; but the 
truth that there is in this compromising view is 
the truth that his companionship makes up a 
large part of a man's moral life. Under ordinary 
social conditions an austere separatist not only 
forfeits the greater part of his influence through 
his separatism : he forfeits thereby a great part of 
his own moral life, not only in the lower moralities 
but in the higher moralities as well. The com- 
pany that a man keeps is and must always be a 
great part of himself. 

What I have said thus far comes to this, that the 
moral life is found at its best only where there is 
found a well-balanced growth in righteousness. 
Now, there is another way of looking at the round- 
ing out and balancing of the moral character, con- 
cerning which something may be said. Taking 
account once more of both the individual and the 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 85 

comraunity, what shall we say of the cultivation of 
special virtues, what of the prosecution of special 
reforms ? 

A man makes it his particular business to rise 
early in the morning, to be benevolent, to wage 
war on gambling or profanity. A woman under- 
takes to tell the literal truth in all her social in- 
tercourse. A community organizes a campaign 
against drunkenness or municipal corruption. 

It is obvious enough that the special undertak- 
ing distorts the perspective of our moral world. 
The campaigner in the one Cause not only makes 
himself a thorn and a weariness to those who are 
not enlisted in the same campaign : he inevitably 
exaggerates that aspect of righteousness to which 
his attention is devoted, and so far forth he ren- 
ders it more difficult for the world to understand 
the main significance and worth of righteousness. 
He glorifies reform and thereby discounts some- 
thing better than reform, the practice of building 
right, from the ground up, on the lines of a well- 
wrought plan. In nine cases out of ten he lays 
his emphasis upon some negation, and so gives 
greater currency to that word of universal paraly- 
sis — DonH. What shall we say to things like 
these ? 

The first thing to be said, in order that there 
may be no mistake, is that, in the world we live 
in, the special reform is inevitable and indispen- 
sable. With all of its drawbacks it is still a main 



86 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

reliance of humanity for any moral awakening. 
Human nature is not big enough to do all things 
at once. It must ever and again become absorbed 
in the partial task, or else spread itself out over 
a world of possibilities in thin, reflective, even- 
balanced inefiiciency. Better than this, a thou- 
sand times better, are those nodes of concentrated 
activity where practical men see the urgent need 
of their time and fight their fight with the Enemy 
as they find him. 

But when so much has been said, we may re- 
turn to the undoubted evils that attend any reform 
campaign, whether it be a campaign in the spirit 
of a man or in society at large, and may see if 
anything can be done about them. Those evils, 
in a word, are the evils that go with favorite vir- 
tues. No man can devote his best energies to a 
selected and preferred virtue without danger to 
his moral life. The favorite virtue brings with 
it a favorite vice or a whole company of favorite 
vices. One of these is likely to be the vice of self- 
righteousness. Another is that of intolerance. 
Still another is that peculiar form of vice in which 
the exaggerated virtue is made a substitute for 
other, starved and neglected, virtues; the one 
great good covering a multitude of sins, in a way 
which scripture precedent would not warrant. 

The members of a band of thieves pride them- 
selves upon their loyalty to the gang. The high- 
wayman who robs the rich gives generously to the 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 87 

poor. A body of young men who uphold the high- 
est standard of truth and honesty show an easy 
conscience as regards drink and gambUng and the 
social evil. Even women of the purest virtue, as 
the word virtue is commonly used, are sometimes 
sadly lacking in the sense of fair play, as men of 
honor understand fair play, and fail to realize that 
uncharitable words are another form of vice. 

Favorite vices go with favorite virtues. This 
fact should not deter us from cultivating chosen 
virtues when occasion may demand, But it 
should put us doubly on our guard. Let us have, 
if need be, the campaign against a conspicuous 
wrong. But let it be recognized as an emergency 
measure. Our main business is right living, all 
round and all through. The great reform has its 
necessary work to do. But, as soon as possible, 
that work is to be finished. It is to be laid aside, 
in order that the regenerated individual or com- 
munity may enter upon the normal course of 
general growth. That normal course is the course 
in which wisdom joins with tolerant fellow- 
ship, holding men up to an ideal of everlasting 
improvement. 

It is here that we are chiefly concerned with the 
culture of righteousness — in maintaining and 
confirming the general conception of life which 
looks to incessant moral betterment. Here is a 
subject for the daily meditation of wise men and 
women, for the training of children in the schools, 



88 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

for consideration in every profession, institution, 
and society which has influence in the shaping of 
our corporate or individual Ufe. Let us think 
often upon these things and let us seek after the 
better ways. 

But many of you, I am sure, have felt a lack in 
this discussion hitherto. It has had reference to 
virtues and vices as if these, in aggregation, made 
up our moral being. You have felt that righteous- 
ness cannot be achieved by adding one pagan 
excellence to another ; that we must have regard 
instead to motives, to faith and hope, to some 
vitalizing spirit which shall bring to every man a 
moral strength beyond the strength of any man. 
You look, in other words, for some recognition of 
the religious side of morals, with the conviction 
that the thing omitted is the really essential thing. 
This view appeals to me so strongly, and accords, 
in fact, so nearly with my own thought, that I 
should be altogether unwilling to let the occasion 
pass without some mention of this aspect of my 
subject, though the difficulties of this part of the 
discussion are obvious and plentiful. 

Any attempt at the cultivation of righteousness 
merely by the cultivation of enumerated virtues 
can give us only an incoherent and machine-made 
morality. The moral life, to reach its highest 
efficiency, must hold with the largest wisdom and 
the highest fellowship to which the moral agent 
can attain — that is, with his religion, or what 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 89 

serves him as a religion. Only so can it come to 
its proper coherence and vitality. 

How much of vitality and coherence religion 
may supply will appear from a mere passing 
glance at some of the conceptions of Christianity. 
We speak of righteousness. In the words, "Be 
ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
is in Heaven is perfect," all human excellence is 
thrown into such comparison that it looks black, 
as a candle flame against the brightness of the 
sun. But while all human worth suffers this 
deep disparagement, the value of the human soul 
is raised to such a height that it can be calculated 
only in terms of the death of the Son of God. 
Hope reaches no less a pitch of confidence than 
that this mortal life shall share in the life of God 
Himself, and all perspectives of this earthly ex- 
istence are readjusted to the view from the gates 
of Heaven. Love, purified, quickened, elevated, 
by the vision of love divine, made universal in 
the recognition of human brotherhood, becomes 
the ruling motive of life. The uplift of such 
conceptions, when they are fairly apprehended 
and appropriated, is well-nigh inconceivable. 
Their dynamic possibilities are past all compu- 
tation. In a world in which such ideas are at 
work, as positive convictions in the hearts of 
men, we cannot doubt that the greatest moral 
elevation will be attained in lives which ac- 
knowledge their supremacy. 



90 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

Yet the very loftiness of these conceptions for- 
bids that any one human mind should actually 
take in their full significance. To assimilate 
them in their entirety is the work of the human 
race in the ages upon ages. One age, one society, 
one individual, may interpret them in part. Even 
that is a great achievement. But the partiality 
of the interpretations cannot be overlooked when 
we are dealing with the moral interests of present- 
day society. The man, the church, the people, 
who approach the moral life by the starry way, 
which is also the cloudy way, of the religious life, 
cannot escape the same need that all others are 
under, the need of cultivation of the moral senti- 
ments, the need of daily betterment as regards 
moral insight and the practice of righteousness. 

A man's religion may indeed become for him a 
preferred virtue with its attendant vices. I was 
told, once on a time, of an influential man of 
business who gave largely to the support of the 
church and became deeply interested in its ac- 
tivities. A friend suggested that he should join 
its membership in his home community. He 
asked to see the list of its communicants. This 
list he ran through quickly, then threw it down 
in disgust. 

*'Do you think I will go in with such an [ex- 
purgated] set — " he did not say expurgated; 
the word merely represents what I have done 
with his speech — *'Do you think I will go in 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 91 

with such a set of dead-beats ? They don't 

pay their debts." Now, assuming that this re- 
mark, apart from its profanity, was justified in 
the situation to which it was appUed, what was its 
significance ? I think it showed that the man of 
affairs made a favorite virtue of paying one's 
debts, and let it excuse his measure of irreligion ; 
while the church members to whom he referred 
made their religion a favorite virtue, and let it 
excuse their measure of laxness as regards their 
business obligations. 

Perhaps a more common case may be found in 
the devoted adherent of some form of religion 
whose special indulgence is in the vice of self- 
complacency, of self -righteousness. It was this 
that called forth the sharp rebukes of Jesus in 
his meetings with the Scribes and Pharisees. It 
would be hard to estimate the injury which this 
failing has done to both morals and religion in all 
the ages. Clear thought, again and again, has 
lost its rightful influence among men because 
joined with this uncompanionable vice, this 
enemy of all goodly fellowship, intolerance 
toward those who follow other ways. 

And there are other ways, which may be 
Christian, profoundly so, while not bearing con- 
spicuously the name of Christ. The two poles 
of Christianity may be found in the Fatherhood of 
God and the Brotherhood of Man. Each of these 
implies and involves the other. A theological age 



92 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

laid conscious emphasis on the doctrine of the 
Fatherhood. A humanitarian age now lays its 
emphasis on Brotherhood, and is often hesitant 
and reticent as regards the language of Our 
Father. It may be that this reserve is not irre- 
ligion at all, but only the way in which this age 
can most surely approach the real experience of 
religion. 

Yet the responsibility for an orderly interpre- 
tation of Christianity, consecutive with the in- 
terpretations of the past, rests in this age with 
the church, as in all other ages. The church is 
still the teacher of religion. The necessary sepa- 
ration of religious instruction from our secular 
schools leaves this great burden, with all of its 
weight and all of its honor, with the church alone. 
For my part, I believe the church will not fail to 
carry that burden safely and well, and even to 
larger issues than can at this time be foreseen. 

But in this very separation of functions, an- 
other moral responsibility, great and high, is laid 
upon our secular education. I have spoken of 
the value of impersonality, as it appears in one 
necessary stage of the making of human charac- 
ter — the impersonality of courts and of sciences, 
which are no respecters of persons. These things 
ultimately are not impersonal, for they help us to 
a purer and truer understanding of human rela- 
tions. But they do this by first casting out human 
prejudice, passion, and preference, casting out 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 93 

all hopes and fears, and leading men into the im- 
partial recognition of objective reality. Now, I 
think I shall not be misunderstood if I say that 
the teaching of morals apart from religious sanc- 
tions has a place in our scheme of life analogous 
to that of these impersonal disciplines. It is not 
impersonal as regards human relations, but only 
as regards that unseen world with which religion 
is concerned. And here, I think, it is not ulti- 
mately irreligious, but only, for the time, non- 
religious. As such, it has a part to perform, a 
part of great dignity and importance, in setting 
forth those purely ethical conceptions, unmixed 
with any thought of supra-natural rewards and 
punishments, which even the ancient pagan world 
found to be strong meat for its noblest intellects, 
and which appear to not a few writers of this 
modern age to be the highest themes with which 
the mind of man can deal. 

It is not that I would offer such teaching as 
sufficient for all human need. Men need good 
news and a Father in Heaven as much in this 
age as in any former age. But the study of 
ethical knowledge and the training in simple 
morality of life is not only of value to the 
individual doer and student : it is of value even 
to religion itself. It brings the teachings of 
religion ultimately before the impartial judg- 
ment of that simple sense of difference between 
right and wrong which the Creator has put 



94 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

into the spirit of man, and has trained and 
developed through the long course of his history. 
The strongest appeal which religion can ever 
make is the appeal to this human sense of moral 
difference; and the cultivation of that sense, 
through science and literature and historical 
studies, through conduct in the little world of the 
school, is the noblest service which our general 
education has to render. It is a service to re- 
ligion and law and common intercourse and to 

everv other interest of our modern life. 

t/ 

This is your Commencement, members of 
this graduating class. You commence to be bach- 
elors of arts and various other things. You are 
coming out from this University into more direct 
participation in the world of affairs — affairs 
which reach their highest difficulty and highest 
significance in questions of right and wrong. The 
boys in a swimming pool, particularly on a chilly 
day, are wont to call to their fellows on the shore, 
*' Come on in, the water is fine ! " And so we who 
left school life for active life a good many years 
ago now call to you, young men, *'Come in, this 
Twentieth Century is fine !" Science and inven- 
tion are making readjustments a daily necessity. 
Prosperity is making it harder every day to hold 
up to the old moral standards. There is great 
danger that with a better living we shall get a 
poorer life. People are crowding now, where a 
generation ago they were few. Yet we feel the 



THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 95 

need of sharing more fairly all good things of life 
with all of our fellow men. Faiths are changing. 
Even while we hold them most tightly we find 
that they are gone, leaving only their clothes or 
their shadow behind, and we do not see clearly 
what is to take their place. Come in ! It is a 
world of genuine difficulties in which it is worth 
while to live and take one's part as it comes. 

Faith, Hope, and Love — they are with us 
yet; justice, truth, and the law of righteous- 
ness — they loom as large as ever. Though 
their forms are less sharply defined, yet none 
the less surely they dominate the scene. Lib- 
erty and law are wrestling with each other 
still. They clinch like deadly enemies, and 
the sweat of their conflict now and again is 
red with human blood. Yet they are lovers, 
more true to each other than were even David 
and Jonathan, and their struggle is all for the 
good of mankind. Come, young men, and take 
your part. Be as wise as you can with the 
heads that have been given to you. Be as com- 
panionable as you can without becoming less 
wise. And do not doubt that the God of your 
fathers will help you as He helped your fathers be- 
fore you and that all that Heaven gave into their 
lives. Heaven will give into your lives as well. 

And you, young women, who are about to leave 
this institution, you will find many alumnae of 
American colleges awaiting you. And these 



96 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

American alumnse have already acquitted them- 
selves so well that larger work, larger responsi- 
bilities, larger joy of service, are sure to be yours. 
Come, young graduates, men and women both, 
and enter upon a new course of study, the life- 
long study of righteousness, which, as it is a study 
laid out for us by God Himself, when He laid the 
courses of all human affairs, shall through its 
various leadings lead us back to God. 



VI 

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MOVE- 
MENT FOR INTERNATIONAL 
ARBITRATION 

An Address before the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the 
Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, 
May 23, 1907. Published in the Report of the Meeting. 



VI 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MOVEMENT 
FOR INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 

BY way of introduction, I may venture to 
i repeat the recommendation touching this 
subject contained in my first annual re- 
port as Commissioner of Education. It reads 
as follows: 

The second recommendation which I would respectfully 
present is concerned with the fact, which every year makes 
more obvious, that our public education has passed into 
an international stage in its development. The approach of 
the second International Peace Conference at The Hague 
has turned public attention to the many-sided modern 
movement toward a peaceful adjustment of international 
relations. Governments, in striving to maintain an honor- 
able peace, require the reinforcement of popular senti- 
ment, and it is of the utmost importance that such public 
sentiment should steadily demand a peace which makes 
for righteousness, and no other peace than that which will 
make for righteousness. A public sentiment calling for 
such peace will be stable only when it rests upon an appre- 
ciative understanding of other nations. In this there is a 
great work for education the world over, that it help the 
nations understand one another. Whatever the schools 
may do to this great end will count for real education. 



100 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

Can any form of learning, in fact, be more liberalizing, 
more expanding, more tonic, than the insight gained 
through knowledge of other peoples, our contemporaries, 
who with us are the makers of modern history ? 

Already a considerable movement is under way looking 
to the annual commemoration in the schools of the United 
States of the opening of the first Hague conference, which 
occurred on the 18th day of May, 1899. Such a celebration 
seems eminently desirable, by way of laying due emphasis 
in the schools upon the vital relations of modern peoples 
one to another. I would accordingly recommend that, so 
far as consistent with state and local conditions, the 18th 
day of May in each year be designated as a day of special 
observance in the schools. It is particularly desirable that 
in the celebration of this anniversary day, and in the in- 
struction of the schools throughout the year, the effort be 
made to promote an insight into the true aims and aspira- 
tions of our own nation and of the other nations with whom 
we are to work together in the making of a higher world 
civilization. This view calls for a more thorough teach- 
ing of geography and history in the elementary schools, 
that the first notions formed by the children in those schools, 
of our relations with other lands and peoples, may be true 
and temperate; it calls for a better teaching of modern 
languages and literatures in our secondary schools and 
colleges; and in the more highly specialized studies of 
commercial and technical schools, it calls for more thor- 
ough and accurate instruction in all subjects having to do 
with the relations of our home land with foreign lands. 

This is not a foreign view of American education, but 
rather an American view; for it is already clear that 
American institutions can reach their full development 
only by finding their rightful place in the current of the 
world's history, and that only by so doing can they become 
fully American. 



INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 101 

While no one will attach supreme importance 
to the special observance of one day in the school 
year, even such annual emphasis upon this 
theme will not be without its value. I am the 
more disposed to think that it may be of some 
significance, from the fact that the idea of such 
observance has arisen quite independently in 
the minds of different persons engaged in widely 
separate educational service. I had planned 
to make this recommendation and had actually 
written the first draft of it before I knew that 
such a plan had occurred to any one else. When 
it transpired that a well-defined movement to 
this end was already under way, I was glad of 
the opportunity of adding what I might to the 
impetus of that movement. 

It is clear, however, that a celebration which 
breaks from a clear sky on one day in the year 
and passes from thought when that day is past, 
cannot take a deep hold on the minds of many 
children. Nor do I think we have a right to 
devote one day of the school year to a purpose 
which has no connection with the ends of general 
education. It is not with a view to propaganda 
of an isolated reform that this day is entitled to 
its special place in our school calendar, but 
with a view to a neglected and essential element 
in general education. And that element is an 
appreciative understanding of other peoples 
than our own. 



102 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

The child brought up apart from other children 
misses his best chance of a practical education. 
So a people that goes on in ignorance of other 
peoples or in blind antagonism to other peoples, 
misses its chance of adding their civilization to 
its own. It is just this element of a liberal 
education which should be emphasized in the 
schools, not one day in the year but throughout 
the year — such a knowledge and appreciation 
of the other peoples of the earth as shall help us 
to add the good things of their civilization to our 
own civilization and to live wdth them in the 
enjoyment of civilized relationships. Even well 
down in the elementary schools, the effort of our 
little Americans to overcome the primitive dis- 
trust and disparagement of the peoples of foreign 
lands is a liberalizing influence. It is, indeed, an 
Americanizing influence. 

But this, after all, is but a small part of what 
the schools ought to do to promote international 
arbitration. The best that they can do, in the 
long run, is to foster the genuine spirit of arbitra- 
tion, and to establish those modes of thought 
that dispose men to arbitrate their differences. 
Let us consider here three ways of settling differ- 
ences among men, and see what the teaching 
of the schools may be expected to do by way of 
furthering that type of thought which lies nearest 
to arbitration. The primitive way of settling a 
quarrel is an appeal to arms, a decisive physical 



INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 103 

fight. This is the spontaneous method of un- 
controlled anger. But it has in it many nobler 
elements, and chief among these is the religious 
faith that the God of might and right will add 
His strength to the strength of the righteous 
cause. Each combatant is sure that the righteous 
cause is his own, and the strong sweep of his 
anger and his faith is seen in his readiness to 
risk losing all in the hope of gaining all. A second 
way is the way of compromise. A willingness to 
compromise shows that the parties to the quarrel 
hold one thing as of greater value than the 
things for which they are contending, and that 
one thing more precious than all the rest is peace. 
Or, at least, each of the contending parties holds 
that a fragment of that for which it strives, 
together with relief from strife, is better than 
the chance of gaining all through hard and 
dubious conflict. Compromise has, no doubt, 
its rightful place and in the daily dealings of 
men with men it must play an important part — 
a larger part, indeed, than we commonly realize. 
But on the whole it represents a weaker attitude 
than the attitude of direct antagonism backed 
up by strong conviction. An age in which com- 
promise takes the leading place instead of a 
subsidiary and intercalary place, an age dis- 
tinctly characterized by the spirit of compromise, 
is not ''an age on ages telKng" when '*to be 
living is sublime." 



104 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

A third method of settling a dispute, a method 
hard to practice and even hard to define, the 
method which arbitration ultimately represents 
and reinforces, is the method of finding some 
ground of positive agreement higher than the 
ground taken by either antagonist at the begin- 
ning of the strife. In every dispute between 
honest and intelligent disputants we find some 
show of justice in each of the conflicting claims. 
The method of war crushes the claim of one 
side, with all the good and bad there is in it, 
and gives victory to the other side with all of 
its bad as well as its good. The method of com- 
promise takes the course which leads to peace, 
even though much of the good of either cause be 
sacrificed by the way. The method of arbitration 
would seem to be merely the method of com- 
promise through the agency of a third party, 
but essentially it is more than this. For every 
well-conducted international arbitration contrib- 
utes to the building up of a higher conception 
of international obligations, of world relations, 
and is accordingly in its effect a bringing of the 
disputants together on higher and more stable 
ground than either of them occupied when the 
strife began. I think this view may be abun- 
dantly justified by examples from modern history. 
There is not time, however, for such illustration, 
and the bare and general statement must be left 
to stand alone. 



INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 105 

The immediate question is that as to the re- 
lation of public schools to the type of thinking 
which lies back of arbitration procedure. It 
seems clear that this is the very type of think- 
ing which is characteristic of modern educa- 
tion at its best. It is the type of thinking which 
should be promoted in schools of every grade, 
in the interest of liberal culture, rightly under- 
stood. It is by promoting such culture and estab- 
lishing such modes of thought among our people 
everywhere that the public schools can lay the 
surest foundation for the arbitration principle. 

The watchword of this movement may fairly 
be taken as the watchword of all modern educa- 
tion, and we may phrase it in the words. Let us 
look for a better way. The spirit which it repre- 
sents is at one with that of modern science — 
of that science which is undoubtedly the domi- 
nant influence in the methods of modern edu- 
cation. For science, with all of its strength of 
conviction, holds its doctrines not as records of 
final attainment nor as banners set up for a battle 
to the end, but rather as well-laid steps of an 
ascent. It expects something better beyond, 
expects to rise above its present knowledge and 
belief; and in that expectation it is able to look 
upon any intelligent opposition as indicating the 
need of finding some higher principle which 
shall solve the present difference. Even in the 
lower schools, by ways that are often intangible, 



106 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

this spirit is making its way. It is not too much 
to hope that it will become broadly character- 
istic of the teaching of all of our schools, and 
when it has become so characteristic of that 
teaching, the principle of arbitration will be 
grounded in the educational consciousness of 
our whole people. 

Before we leave this discussion, there are two 
added considerations to which attention should 
be called. The arbitration movement looks for 
its success to the cultivation of a decent respect 
for the opinions of mankind. In the heat of 
national anger it is too much to expect that any 
people will welcome from its opponent the sug- 
gestion that there are better grounds on which 
they may hope to meet. If, however, our people 
have been trained from their youth to recognize 
in every sharp difference of opinion the pos- 
sibility of there being some higher and better 
ground of agreement, undiscovered as yet, there 
cannot fail to be in time a little greater readiness 
to appeal to an impartial world, to peoples not 
involved in the dispute, and to respect the sug- 
gestion from without of a better way to an hon- 
orable peace. It is here that an increased un- 
derstanding of other nations than our own may 
be expected to reinforce the teaching that leads 
men to hope for a better way. It is not simply 
that a knowledge of other nations, well taught 
in the schools, will lead us to consider more 



INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 107 

carefully the claims of an antagonist in time of 
trouble, but that it will prepare our people, or 
any people, to look with more favor upon an 
appeal to the judgment of the civilized world. 

In the second place, such an appeal to an 
impartial tribunal would be strengthened in 
the minds of any people if that people were 
grounded in some of the fundamental principles 
of human law. On other grounds than this, it is 
to be desired that the elementary principles of 
legal right should be more distinctly taught in 
our schools along with the principles of common 
morality. This is not the place to enlarge upon a 
topic like this, which must be subordinate to the 
main discussion of this occasion. But it is not 
out of place to say that those great elementary 
principles of right and justice which have been 
the nourishing thought of many of the greatest 
minds of our race, are in themselves a most 
desirable element in the liberal culture of all our 
people. I cannot but think that a people trained 
to have respect for principles such as these will 
be so much the better prepared to accept in time 
of controversy the view that neither party to the 
dispute is the rightful judge of the cause, but 
that the cause should be judged by a competent 
and regularly constituted tribunal which should 
have no selfish interest in the question at issue. 

Briefly stated, then, the contention of this paper 
is as follows: That the schools of our whole 



108 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

people may properly contribute to the move- 
ment for international arbitration only in ways 
that contribute to the general purposes of educa- 
tion, but that positive improvements in educa- 
tion are called for to-day in ways that must 
inevitably reinforce the arbitration movement. 
Among these ways are endeavors to promote 
among a given people, as our own, a more inti- 
mate and appreciative knowledge of the character 
of other modern nations with whom this people 
has to do; the promotion in the schools of that 
type of thinking which readily passes beyond its 
partial convictions, no matter how earnestly 
held, to larger views in which opposing convic- 
tions may find their rightful recognition and come 
to agreement; the teaching in the schools, as a 
part of our instruction in morals and civil gov- 
ernment, of some of the elementary principles 
of legal justice, which shall enable our people 
to adjust themselves freely and consciously to 
the reign of law in all great human affairs. The 
argument amounts to this, that our education 
of all the people shall be made at once more 
scientific and more humanistic in its character, 
and that the schools shall teach the people in all 
their concerns to look for a better way. 

Let it be added that education cannot be 
expected to prepare the way specifically for the 
arbitration of any particular cause. When in- 
ternational irritation has arisen and there is 



INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 109 

threatening of war, the work of education for the 
time is under arrest. Not only the laws but the 
teachers as well are silent in the clash of arms, 
or in the clash of temper which threatens an 
appeal to arms. Our hope is that education may 
exercise an influence far in advance of the crisis, 
which shall turn men to some international 
tribunal before the irritation has arisen to violent 
anger from which there is no appeal but to arms. 
Education can do very little to allay the wrath 
of nations, but it can do much to hold the na- 
tions back from uncontrollable wrath while the 
question is still new and in the balance. The 
schools cannot prepare to-day for the crisis of 
this year. They are to prepare to-day for the 
crisis of ten years hence or a generation hence. 
But this of itself may be a work of inconceivable 
significance. And the way in which so great a 
result may be compassed is the way of making 
familiar and natural to a whole people, and to 
possibly antagonistic peoples, a mode and habit 
of thought, a moral devotion to conceptions of 
justice and righteousness, which shall give to 
the advocates of arbitration their chance to be 
heard and understood. 



VII 

POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN 

THE EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS 

OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES 

Contributed to a Discussion in the National Council of 
Education, at its Meeting at Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 
1908. Published in the Proceedings of the National 
Education Association for the year 1908, and in The 
Independent of August 6, 1908. 



VII 

POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE 

EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF 

DIFFERENT COUNTRIES 

THE suggestion which was made to this 
Council one year ago, that steps be 
taken to bring the National Education 
Association into closer co-operation with similar 
bodies in other lands, was offered in the con- 
viction that the greater part of the work of 
education in all lands is one work, and that all 
teachers among civilized peoples have a common 
cause. There is abundant ground for this belief. 
The legislative bodies of many nations have 
found enough of common interest to make 
possible an Interparliamentary Union, and that 
international body has profoundly influenced the 
course of recent history. Yet parliaments are 
the centers of positive nationalism. We may 
fairly expect to find more elements of unity in 
the schools of different nations than in their 
legislatures. And such undoubtedly is now the 
case. 

The world relationships of universities have 
been recognized, with varying clearness, for 



114 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

seven or eight centuries. The earHer develop- 
ment of schools for the people was more closely 
connected with the rise of modern nationalism. 
This gave us higher schools which emphasized 
unity, alongside of lower schools which empha- 
sized difference. Such a distinction of course 
ffoes down to the fundamental constitution of 
society. It cannot be maintained, as a principle 
of sharp separation, where the distinctions be- 
tween social classes have been smoothed out or 
are in the way of disappearing. Nations which 
have a traditional enmity to keep alive toward 
some of their neighbors — a memory of ancient 
quarrels which colors all their history — are at 
a disadvantage in this regard. In so far as class 
distinctions persist in such societies, with some- 
thing of the finality of caste distinctions, a lower 
class will be taught to hate another people while 
the highest class is learning to understand other 
peoples. 

But this condition can hardly continue, un- 
modified, in our modern world. The many care 
to learn what the few have known. The scientific 
spirit forbids us to teach in the lower schools 
what is untrue from the standpoint of the higher 
schools. Then, there is a New Humanism in the 
world, which is surely spreading abroad. This 
new humanism recognizes the fact that to know 
and understand living men, both individuals and 
nations, is a great part of any complete educa- 






INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION 115 

tion. This humanism tinges all of the social 
and the international striving of our time. It 
tinges our education. I have had occasion before 
to speak of one little symptom of it — a straw on 
the waters of our primary schools — in the wide 
popularity of that children's book, the ** Seven 
Little Sisters," by Miss Andrews. And for more 
pretentious indications of the same current you 
would not have far to seek. 

We live already in a world in which men are 
trying to understand one another. Men are 
trying to understand their neighbors, and that 
is the better part of democracy. Men are trying 
to understand other peoples and nations, and 
that is the foundation of our new world-politics. 
The reason why we may hope to understand the 
rest of the world, the reason why we even care 
to understand the rest of the world, is that our 
differences stand out from a background of 
agreement, a substratum of ultimate unity. The 
differences are picturesque and interesting, and 
at times they command the whole field of atten- 
tion. Without national peculiarities and even 
oppositions, our world-unity would be a poor 
thing, a dull and insipid uniformity. But we 
must not forget that, after all, the differences get 
their life and worth from that underlying unity. 
The time has come when men can give attention 
to the common human purposes of all the tribes 
of men without suspicion of treason against 



116 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

their own government. In our own land this 
is pre-eminently true. As Mr. Stead has said 
of us, *' America is the one great international 
country of the world." 

When Professor Payne of the University of 
Virginia a few years ago made his comparative 
study of the public elementary school curricula 
of the leading culture nations, he found an ap- 
proximate agreement in the subjects of instruc- 
tion and in the relative amount of time devoted 
to different subjects in the schools of representa- 
tive cities. Aside from differences as to the 
inclusion or exclusion of religious doctrine, the 
most important variations were those relating 
to the language employed and studied and the 
content of instruction in the national history and 
literature. Even here the instruction in the 
schools under consideration might readily be 
compared with reference to its form and the 
principles guiding the choice of materials in 
those subjects. So striking, indeed, was the 
agreement which his study revealed that Pro- 
fessor Payne was led to make the following 
remarks : 

It is to be feared that our educational theorists have 
sometimes excused themselves from making a compara- 
tive study of these different curricula by an exaggeration 
of the supposed disparity of aim and the consequent im- 
probability of gaining suggestions of worth. The tables 
, . . show such a slight difference of curricula in the ele- 



I 



INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION 117 

mentary schools of the several countries, that it makes one 
suspect either that the aim of education f\&e^ not determine 
what shall be studied, or that the aims of the seVeral 
countries do not differ as much as has been supposed/ 

And again, 

No one can fail to be impressed with the fact that the 
general principles which govern the selection and arrange- 
ment of the subject matter of the elementary curriculum 
are practically the same in the four educational systems 
here studied.^ 

Without doubt, national differences must still 
be more influential in determining the teaching 
of the lower schools than that of the univer- 
sities. In some degree this difference must, I 
think, be regarded as permanent. A strong 
nationalism and even a certain wholesome pro- 
vincialism are to be cherished in those schools. 
But it is quite as important, and is in truth 
essential, in this modern age, that the lower 
schools preserve their continuity with the teach- 
ing of the universities and their loyalty to as- 
pirations which all civilized nations hold in 
common. 

I hope that our great National Education As- 
sociation, in its unquestioned loyalty to our na- 
tional ideals, may take steps which shall promote 

* Payne, Bruce Ryburn. Public elementary school curricula. 
Silver, Burdett and Company [1905], pp. 15-16. 

^ Idem, p. 182. The four educational systems studied were 
those of the United States, England, Germany, and France. 



118 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

the good understanding now gaining ground 
among the nations of the earth. Let us send our 
emissaries to confer with similar bodies in other 
civiHzed lands, as we have so often welcomed 
foreign teachers in our great annual gatherings. 
Let us take our part in setting up world-standards 
in the domain of culture and education. Such 
a movement, I believe, will make for peace; 
but if so, it will accomplish that end by promot- 
ing one of the best tendencies in modern educa- 
tion, a humane tendency, which may be summed 
up in the saying. Let us see if we cannot under- 
stand one another. 



VIII 

ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE IN 
THE FIELD OF EDUCATION? 

An Address before the Vassar College Chapter of Phi Beta 
Kappa, June 10, 1907. Published in Science, August 9, 
1907. 



VIII 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE IN THE 
FIELD OF EDUCATION? 

EVERY invention, I suppose, is made up of 
individual and social elements, and com- 
bines them in a way different from that of 
every other invention. There is no more inter- 
esting department of literary criticism, or aesthetic 
criticism generally, than that which seeks to trace 
out the respective contributions of the race and 
the individual in any work of art. This is illus- 
trated in a recent discussion of the distinction 
between the folk-epic and the art-epic, the char- 
acteristic difference, for example, between the 
Iliad and Paradise Lost.^ Some Homer, in 
the one instance, whatever his name, gave the 
final form to a poetic tale that must have been 
shaping itself in the traditions of his people for 
many generations. In the other instance, in 
which we may distinguish the poem from the con- 
temporary materials out of which it was con- 
structed, the work of the poet looms large, and 

* By Professor C. B. Bradley in The University of California 
Chronicle for June, 1906. 



122 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

the work of the people back of him is obscured 
by his personal fame. Yet, when we analyze 
even Milton's art, with all of its manifestation of 
a fearless and independent personality, we find it 
related in the subtlest ways with the literary tra- 
dition of his time. 

So it is in the history of mechanical invention. 
We have seen recently a running discussion of 
the origin of the electric trolley car. This very 
modern invention is commonly referred for its 
beginnings to the electric railway first operated 
at Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. But it appears 
that that undertaking had a forerunner, and that 
forerunner in its turn had a prototype, and the 
successful American inventor is found to be only 
the topmost figure of a human pyramid, made up 
of no one knows how many experimenters in this 
particular field. The Patent Office has difficulty 
enough in distinguishing each new invention from^ 
its patented predecessors. But when we go aside 
from the series of formal patents and look to the 
succession and mingling of motives and ideas, 
the tangle passes our ability to unravel. We 
can only see how inextricably the stroke of in- 
dividual initiative is enmeshed in the movements 
of a whole people, and that very complication we 
find it a delight to contemplate. 

Now, this social character of all invention ap- 
pears in a peculiarly vital way in any original 
work in education. For education in a special 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 123 

sense not only springs from the people, but in 
turn creates the people from which it springs. 
Education is its own father. An over-emphasis 
on individuality in education would quickly carry 
us away from the line of direct succession. It 
would give us isolation and sterility instead of re- 
creating the spiritual life of the race. 

One cannot add too quickly that in the nature 
of things the danger of a dead lack of individual- 
ity is usually a more threatening danger. But let 
us at once get down to our examples. To begin 
with, we may take the kindergarten. There has 
hardly been a more distinct and conspicuous in- 
vention in the whole history of schools. It is a 
thoroughly conscious and modern work of art, 
in which the personal agency of the inventor 
comes to the fore. That is the very weakness of 
the invention. To this day it has not been assim- 
ilated. In our educational concert it is a voice 
that sweetly sings in tune but that refuses to blend 
with other voices of the chorus. There may be 
different explanations of this lack of accord. It 
may be that the individual note is permanently 
at variance with anything that can be made uni- 
versal. Or it may be that the kindergarten is 
merely in advance of the age and will bring the 
rest of education round into adjustment with it- 
self. It seems pretty clear that both explanations 
are in part correct. The kindergarten, with cer- 
tain other forces that have worked toward sim- 



124 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ilar ends, has brought our elementary education a 
long way toward its type of faith and practice. 
Yet the emphasis on what is distinctively Froebel- 
ian still keeps it a thing apart, and seems likely to 
set a permanent limit to its ascendency. 

It will appear, from this reference to the work of 
Froebel, that we are not now concerned simply or 
chiefly with those inventions which bear the sharp 
stamp of one man's individuality. It is a minor 
consideration that the invention should be known 
at all as the work of a single inventor. Some of 
the most marked of immediate successes and ul- 
timate failures have had that distinctive imprint. 
Such, for example, was the monitorial system, in 
the forms given to it by Joseph Lancaster and 
Doctor Bell. Such a system may have a large 
usefulness of its own in the course of educational 
progress, but it is as scaffolding rather than as 
part of the permanent structure. Its very insist- 
ence upon that which is one man's makes it less 
fit to serve the great needs of Everyman. 

So in varying degrees the educational inven- 
tions of the ages combine the distinct contribution 
of this or that inventor with the broad tendencies 
of an inventive people. What are some of the 
other inventions which Europe has contributed 
to educational history ? I mention only a few of 
them and with little thought for sequence of any 
sort. There is the educational system of the 
Jesuits, particularly in its seventeenth and eigh- 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 125 

teenth century form. There is the Enghsh uni- 
versity, made up of federated colleges. There is 
the seminar, which has been such an instrument 
in the maldng of German university instruction. 
There are two recent contributions of the Swedish 
people, the Sloyd system of hand-work and the 
Ling system of educational gymnastics. Let us 
add the seminary for teachers, the school garden, 
the Hilfsschule or school for backward children, 
the system of higher institutions for commercial 
education, the Gouin method and various other 
successful methods in the teaching of modern 
languages, the English system of university ex- 
tension. Many others will, no doubt, occur to 
you. When w^e come to think over the list, it 
appears that much has been accomplished, and 
that European education has not only been 
greatly widened since the Middle Ages, to reach 
a manifold larger constituency, but has also been 
improved to a wonderful degree by the progress 
of educational invention. 

When we would institute a comparison be- 
tween European and American contributions to 
such improvement, it is well that we consider 
first the wider range of invention. The world at 
large gives to the Americans the credit of being a 
highly inventive people as regards mechanical 
devices. The attention of our people was early 
turned in this direction. Certain conspicuous 
successes fired the national imagination, and the 



126 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

stress of economic need drove us to the same end. 
The Patent Office became a centre of national 
pride. To take out a patent or buy the right to 
sell a patented article or at least to buy something 
with the magic patent label attached thereto, be- 
came a well-nigh universal ambition. And in 
sober truth our record in the making of useful 
inventions is really wonderful. At first thought 
and without an effort you can recall the lightning 
rod, the steamboat, the cotton gin, the whole 
series of reaping machines down to the latest 
combination harvester, the sewing machine, the 
telegraph, the telephone, the arc and the incan- 
descent electric light, the phonograph, and twenty 
other things that are now counted among the nec- 
essaries of modern life. It is a dazzling list, and 
may well make us forget the things we have not 
ourselves invented, but have borrowed from other 
lands. On second thought, however, we recall 
those notable creations, the steam engine, the 
balloon, the power loom, the locomotive engine, 
the daguerreotype — first-fruit of modern photog- 
raphy, — the spectroscope, wireless telegraphy, 
and many others that the wit of Europe has de- 
vised. However much we may lead in the num- 
ber and variety of our cunning contrivances, there 
is enough for which we are indebted to other 
lands to check our conceit and assure us that 
we have competitors. 

On the whole, however, in the domain of 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 127 

mechanism we are undoubtedly in the lead. The 
fact that the number of patents issued annually 
in the United States is now only a little less than 
the whole number issued in all of the rest of the 
civilized world is not without simificance. But 
when we turn to creative literature and the other 
arts the case is changed. Here the leadership 
rests with Europe. VV^e have done good work in 
this field and are rapidly doing better, but not yet 
with that confident leadership which we display 
in mechanical invention. Many of the best short 
stories are ours. We have a score and more of 
writers of creditable verse — and even Europe 
does not seem to be over-productive of great 
poems in these days. We are producing some 
virile sculpture that is not merely imitative, and 
our painters can now command the respect and 
admiration of the world. The superiority of our 
illustration art is recognized. We are erecting 
many good buildings and are producing some 
good music. But, after all, the preponderance of 
inventive excellence in these departments is still 
conceded to Europe. Our architects study at 
the Beaux Arts, our musicians at Leipsic and 
Berlin, and our young painters are known to the 
world when they have exhibited at the Paris 
Salon. 

How, then, does it stand with us in the field of 
education ? I think any one who reads in the 
German pedagogical literature of our day has 



1^8 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

now and then a sense of hopelessness of any edu- 
cational originality. The range of its suggestion 
is in fact astounding. The new plan and con- 
ception of educational procedure which is just 
dawning above his horizon is very likely to appear 
in some German pamphlet or even in some 
"Handbuch der Padagogik" as a familiar notion, 
the boundaries of which have been well marked 
out and its values weighed in the balance. So any 
one familiar with the stream of educational in- 
fluence which has long been crossing the Atlantic 
in our direction will proceed with caution in 
naming our American contributions to educa- 
tional invention. Yet it will be admitted that 
pedagogic discussion in Germany and in other 
countries of Europe often outruns by far the prac- 
tical embodiment of ideas in working institutions, 
and even the great reach of German educational 
doctrine still leaves some things to the educa- 
tional makers of other lands. 

The Europeans themselves are generous in 
giving us credit for the origination of a variety of 
educational contrivance. Among the particulars 
in this bill of credit have been mentioned the 
American school of library practice, the kitchen 
garden, the high school laboratory for instruc- 
tion in natural science, co-education in secondary 
schools and colleges, the combination school of 
the Pratt and the Drexel Institute type. It is 
difficult for us to form a list of our own. We are 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 129 

too close to the facts to be sensible of their dis- 
tinguishing characters, and besides we know that 
Europe has many surprises that might trip us if 
we claimed too much. But at a venture I would 
suggest the following as among our original con- 
tributions to education, making no claim, how- 
ever, that the list is all-inclusive or even includes 
all of the best that we have done. 

First, the non-sectarian elementary school for 
all classes of the community, answering to our 
democratic social organization and our religious 
liberty. 

Secondly, the American high school, serving at 
once as a continuation of the elementary school 
and an introduction to the higher education, with 
courses meeting a variety of tastes and needs. 

Thirdly, the American university, with its com- 
bination of instruction and research, of cultural 
and technological courses, and with liberal and 
professional departments often dovetailing into 
each other. To this might be added that notable 
invention, that new development of personal 
efficiency, the American university president. 

To these institutions, at the core and center of 
our educational system, we might easily add a 
number of minor features of that system, no one 
of them insignificant in itself. The summer 
school may be mentioned, with its home-study 
development, as in the Chautauqua type; the 
text-book in its better forms, and the better type 



130 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

of instruction based on the use of the book ; the 
college gymnasium, for physical education; the 
consolidated country school, with provision for 
the transportation of pupils ; the organization of 
public libraries and museums in close connection 
with the work of public schools. How^ many 
others there are that come crowding on the atten- 
tion ! One is tempted to mention Helen Keller 
as one of our most admirable educational achieve- 
ments. The story of her training into normal and 
honored womanhood is one of the most stimulat- 
ing passages in our educational history. And 
Tuskegee is another. Then, too, we recall our 
schools for the training of nurses, which in a very 
few years have come to enroll twenty thousand 
students annually. I may speak of another ex- 
ample, which falls within my own sphere of labor, 
for as a new invention it was the work of my 
honored predecessors. I refer to that special 
type of industrial training which is connected 
with the introduction of domestic reindeer into 
Alaska. 

In that northern country the necessity of mak- 
ing some better provision by which the natives 
might clothe and feed themselves, was the 
mother of this combined industrial and educa- 
tional invention. Reindeer were imported from 
Siberia. Teachers were brought from Lapland. 
And the Eskimo were set to the lesson of caring 
for the deer, of breaking them to the sled, of using 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 131 

them in profitable service of the incoming white 
population; and so of adjusting their lives to a 
new industry, by which they might maintain 
themselves in the face of new conditions which 
threatened their very existence. Here was a truly 
constructive treatment of a most difficult racial 
problem. A new industry was fitted to new con- 
ditions and a new education was based on that 
new industry. While the arrangement has not 
yet shown what its full development may be, it 
has become well established in these more than 
fifteen years, and already it has made its place 
and proved its usefulness. 

But we cannot fairly estimate the measure of 
our inventiveness unless we turn to the other 
side, and see what are some of the defects in our 
system which we have left uncorrected. These 
are the points where our educational invention 
has thus far failed to do its work, and they are 
neither few nor unimportant. I think it will ap- 
pear that all along the line, from the bottom to 
the top, our educational system, the object of so 
great national pride, is still marked by serious 
inadequacies. 

We have not yet made any great improvement 
in the nurture of children at home, up to the kin- 
dergarten age or the age of the primary school. 

We have not yet brought the kindergarten 
into full adjustment to our educational system 
nor devised any adequate substitute for the 
kindergarten. 



132 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

We have found ways of keeping one half of our 
pupils in school up to the sixth or seventh grade, 
but we have not found ways of keeping all of 
them to the end of the elementary course. 

We have not yet organized nature studies in the 
schools into any well-knit adjustment to general 
education. 

We have not yet carried our instruction in 
drawing up into fully effective training for the 
fine arts, in secondary and higher schools. 

We have not yet brought our religious educa- 
tion, as carried on in Sunday-schools, into any 
effective parallelism with the secular instruction 
of the public schools. 

We have not yet brought our normal schools 
into satisfactory adjustment with our cherished 
sequence of schools from the kindergarten to the 
university. 

We have not yet wrought out a satisfactory 
arrangement for the training of teachers for 
secondary and higher schools. 

We have hardly as yet established a permanent 
teaching profession. 

We have not devised adequate means of giving 
needed cultivation, aesthetic, intellectual, and 
moral, to the individuals who make up the stu- 
dent body of our mammoth universities. 

We have yet to work our way through the gas- 
eous, centrifugal atomism of our college elective 
courses into an organized and unified national 
culture. 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 133 

We have not yet achieved a national standard 
in our academic and professional education, nor 
have we organized any effective and economical 
co-operation among our schools of graduate in- 
struction and research. 

We have not yet devised ways by which pub- 
lic education can be definitely and adequately 
focussed upon the improvement of our national 
morality. 

The list, again, is by no means complete, but 
it is surely long enough for the purposes of this 
discussion. 

I do not take a pessimistic view of the situation 
in which these defects appear. In every one of 
the particulars enumerated, serious efforts toward 
improvement are making even now, and we can- 
not doubt that full success will ultimately be 
achieved. There have been devoted teachers 
who have labored long for such improvement, 
and in some instances their accomplishment has 
been great and beneficent. But that our triumphs 
in these particulars have been local and excep- 
tional rather than permanent and national, will 
be generally agreed, and it is well that we look 
this unwelcome fact in the face. 

We may now attempt a direct answer to the 
question which was asked at the beginning. Are 
we an inventive people in the field of education ? 
We are, unmistakably, an inventive people in this 
fiield. It can hardly be doubted by any one who 



134 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

looks upon the exuberant Americanism of our 
elementary schools, the great expansion and con- 
tinued readjustment of our secondary education, 
the growth of our universities and of univer- 
sity influence in ways that catch so exactly our 
national characteristics and turn them to aca- 
demic ends; nor can it be doubted by any one 
who watches from year to year the spread of our 
education into new fields by new and untried 
processes. We are inventive in our education, 
but it is not yet clear that we are pre-eminent in 
this regard, and our educational invention still 
lags far behind our invention in the domain of 
mechanism. 

We may easily be misled by the flattering re- 
ports of foreign visitors. With all of their frank- 
ness in pointing out our defects, their general 
criticism of our schools is for the most part ex- 
tremely favorable. But we must not forget that 
education with us is in the sweep of a strong tide 
of popular sentiment. Every invention that we 
have put forth is carried forward by that current 
and finds opportunity to do, in full swing, its 
destined work. Not that individual inventors do 
their work unhampered and with no discouraging 
delays. That could never be. But, by contrast 
with Europe, the way of educational improve- 
ment here is direct and clear. We cannot yet 
fairly judge what our education would accomplish 
under greater difficulties and in the face of closer 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 135 

competition. It is safest for us to take the mod- 
erate view, and hold that our educational suc- 
cesses thus far, great and glorious as they are, are 
only great enough to confirm our hope and confi- 
dence, and not yet sufficiently great to insure to 
us the ultimate leadership. 

Our inventiveness in this field is less con- 
spicuous, as has been said, our education shows 
less of readiness to seize obscure suggestions and 
carry them through to unlooked-for triumphs of 
efficiency, than that which we have long disclosed 
in our Patent Office reports. Yet this field is at 
least as interesting as the other. It makes in- 
tense appeal to widely differing minds, and public 
attention is often drawn to new educational pro- 
jects in a measure that is truly astonishing. 
What is needed is that that public interest 
should be more sustained and more discriminat- 
ing; that the inventor in education should have 
the unfailing stimulus which has goaded our 
mechanical inventors to their most strenuous en- 
deavors. And on the part of the inventor him- 
self there is need of all the patience and resource 
of the designer of new mechanism ; and of other 
qualities, subtler far than these, which it may be 
worth our while to consider at this point. 

The inventor in education does not bring 
before the people a new object which they are 
to look upon and admire and use. The people 
are the very stuff of his invention, public sen- 



136 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

timent is his atmosphere, he is an artificer 
of human society. Accordingly he must have, 
many times over, the patience of the mechanical 
inventor. He must be willing to merge his fame 
in the larger life of the invention. For if it is a 
real and living invention he will find that there 
are many collaborators, and it may take genera- 
tions to bring the design to its perfection. In 
education it is generally true that an invention 
that is only of one man size is not large enough 
to last. Yet the work calls for zest and courage, 
and there is ground for individual encourage- 
ment. Social changes are accelerated in these 
days. The single generation has, more than 
ever, its chance of striking an arc of appreciable 
advancement, and there was never a time when 
one man in his one earthly life had a better chance 
of doing some work of noble note. I believe the 
spirit of educational invention can be quickened 
among the men of America, to meet the larger 
demands that are upon us. And if this language 
seems to spread out shield and spear in the house- 
hold of Lycomedes, it is not that I am seeking 
Achilles at Vassar. It should be said rather that 
the highly educated women of America are them- 
selves to have a most important part in this 
educational quickening. Indeed, it is not too 
much to hope that the time is at hand when our 
men and women will take share and share alike 
in this work — alike but different. And we mav 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 137 

trust and pray that the great work that our 
women are ah^eady doing in every phase of social 
improvement may not cause the men of America 
to dream that their responsibiUty can be shifted, 
but may rather remind them that they must not 
fail in their part. 

It may be well to enter here upon some brief 
discussion of three or four of the problems now 
calling for constructive leadership. In the first 
place, let us make note of an unfinished move- 
ment, which demands our best skill and will 
surely reward its exercise. It has been said that 
the education of the school and education by 
apprenticeship, after centuries in which they 
have gone apart, are drawing near together in 
these days. It seems fair to expect, in fact, that 
the school of the future will be the result of their 
union. The combination appears in many forms. 
Most familiar of these, up to the present time, 
is the school laboratory in the natural sciences. 
Here instruction from the book assumes a subor- 
dinate place and the pupil learns by what he 
does. Already, too, the method of the scientific 
laboratory is permeating other departments of 
the school. It has influenced the teaching of 
history and the languages, and we may even see 
its influence extending to the teaching of law in 
the professional school. But now the school 
and the apprentice system are drawing together 
in other ways. The movement is obvious in 
manual training and domestic education. 



138 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

The actual contact of the two systems, how- 
ever, has been especially marked in the past 
two years. At the Carnegie Technical Schools 
in Pittsburg arrangements have been entered 
into by which boys will take a part of their 
training for certain trades in the ordinary 
course of apprenticeship, under the control of 
the trades unions, and another part of their 
training for the same trades in the technical 
schools. At the University of Cincinnati the 
experiment is making of combining work for 
wages in a regular shop with the studies of an 
engineering course, two young men counting 
for one in the shop by alternating on one-week 
shifts, each taking his university studies in the 
week that he is not at the bench. The experi- 
ment is watched with the liveliest interest by 
both shop men and university men and thus far 
it gives promise of success. In the movement 
toward the establishment of public trade schools, 
now under way in Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut and in several other states, the relation of the 
apprenticeship to the school is a question of the 
utmost importance, both educationally and in 
its connection with the problems of trades union- 
ism. From a general pedagogical standpoint the 
combination of the methods of the literary school 
with the methods of apprenticeship seems one 
of the most promising of present opportunities 
for the exercise of educational invention. 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 139 

May I venture, in the second place, to speak 
of the present problem in the higher education 
of women ? I will not say what I think about the 
subject here and now, when I am so happily 
indebted to your generous hospitality. I do not 
think you would care to have me indulge in the 
language of compliment. But before I came to 
Vassar, let us say, the question of woman's 
higher education in America seemed to me to 
lie about as follows : That, after the great ad- 
vance we have made in this field, which has com- 
manded the attention of the world and the 
admiration of a good part of the world, we have 
come to something like a standstill, and some of 
the most important steps have not been taken as 
yet. It has taken a great struggle to establish 
fully the higher education of woman as a simple 
human need. But that battle has been won. 
The integration of woman's education with the 
general scheme of education has been brought 
about. But the differentiation of woman's educa- 
tion is yet to be accomplished. Let us admit 
that the task of integration was by far the greater 
task. But does it follow that the differentiation 
is no task at all ? Or, to put it in other words : 
The functions of men and women in society are 
different in many ways. Do those differences lie 
wholly beyond the range of education ? 1 am 
confident that they cannot permanently be left 
outside of the range of education, but the task 



140 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

of bringing them under educational treatment is 
one of the greatest difficulty. It calls for the 
highest exercise of inventive skill and patience. 
In co-educational institutions, under a system of 
free election, the problem tends to solve itself by 
the gravitation of women toward certain courses 
and of men toward certain other courses, while 
still other courses are common ground. But 
this solution is only partial and unsatisfactory. 
Some practicable scheme of preparation for 
mother- work will, we cannot doubt, be devised 
in the course of time. There will be, some day, 
an education for home making and for woman's 
leading part in the finer forms of social inter- 
course, which will do on the higher academic 
plane what was done in a more petty way, gener- 
ations ago, in popular finishing schools for girls. 
But this, too, is only a part. There is to be, 
further, a serious preparation for woman's work 
in the economic, the industrial, and even the 
political world. What the all-round solution of 
this problem will be, I cannot tell nor even guess. 
But if it meets the need, it will be an educational 
invention of the highest order of excellence. 

In the third place, there is the international 
organization of education. Commissioner Draper 
has recently called attention to the tremendous 
number of men and women engaged in teach- 
ing throughout the world to-day. There are 
not far from three and one-half million of 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 141 

them, according to his estimates. And for the 
most part they are engaged in what is essentially 
the same work, wherever they may be. The full 
realization of the unity of this great body of 
teachers, when it is attained, must have pro- 
found consequences for the peace and civiliza- 
tion of the world. Already we are working toward 
such unity in a number of definite and special 
ways. Many of these ways are already familiar 
to all : The visits of teachers and other educa- 
tional leaders of one country among the schools 
of other peoples; systematic efforts of one 
people to spread a knowledge of their culture 
and ideals among other peoples, as exemplified 
in the Alliance rran9aise; the exchange of 
university professors; and a variety of other 
procedure. 

If the diplomatic relations of nations have 
passed into an economic stage, it should be 
added that they are passing into an educational 
stage. Mr. Barrett, the chief of the Bureau of 
American Republics, urges, with good show of 
reason, that if we wish better commercial relations 
w^ith the proud and sensitive peoples of South 
America, we must first meet them on higher 
ground, through an understanding and recogni- 
tion of their culture and education. Already we 
can see signs of the emergence of world-standards 
in school education and university education and 
particularly in professional education. It is an 



142 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

immediate and practical need that we put our 
higher education into shape to deserve, and by 
deserving to compel, recognition, the world over, 
of our academic and professional degrees. All 
of these things call for new procedure, new 
devices, and new co-ordination of existing agen- 
cies. That is, in the language of this discussion, 
they call for a new exercise of educational inven- 
tion in its very widest range. 

Finally, the international need emphasizes 
the national need. Such a thing has happened 
repeatedly in the history of international rela- 
tions. What we must do to take and keep our 
place among the nations of the earth, reveals to 
us what we must do at home. No one in his 
senses, I am sure, would propose a centraliza- 
tion of American educational systems. But we 
need as never before an effective co-operation of 
our state educational organizations, and of our 
institutions of learning under more private forms 
of control. And when education is spoken of 
here, the meaning is education in its widest 
reach, from the elementary schools through the 
colleges and universities, from the most general 
to the most special of its developments, through 
the several forms of professional instruction, 
through organized scientific research, through 
our provision for libraries and museums and 
those movements which promise for us the mak- 
ing of a really national art. The organization 



ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 143 

of what may be called our national education in 
a manner suited to the spirit of our institutions 
and in forms commensurate with our standing 
among the nations — this is an undertaking 
which must tax the imagination and make de- 
mand for administrative originality such as the 
academic world has seldom seen. But it is a work 
that is to be done. And it will undoubtedly be 
the work of many men and women, brought 
together in intense co-operation, and be extended 
far beyond the limits of a single generation. It 
will be a work of national invention. 

Such, as it now appears, is some small part 
of the task that lies immediately before us. It 
is a work that may well call for the most serious 
consideration of this greatly influential society, 
which aims to make its philosophy a guide into 
the larger life. The plea which has been offered 
amounts in sum to this : That by all means you 
will give encouragement and stimulus and dis- 
criminating criticism to our already awakened 
spirit of educational invention; for it takes no 
second sight to perceive that the times call for 
the exercise of that spirit in the highest things to 
which it may aspire. 



IX 

CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES: 
SOME OF THEIR NEEDS 

An Address delivered before the International Congress on 
the Welfare of the Child at Washington, March, 
1908. Published in the National Congress of Mothers^ 
Magazine, June, 1908. 



IX 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES: SOME 
OF THEIR NEEDS 

THE President of the United States, in 
assigning to me the high honor of com- 
ing before you as his representative, 
expressed his deep and serious interest in your 
undertaking. To promote the general welfare 
by way of a betterment of American childhood 
is, as I understand it, the main object of your ac- 
tivities. It is a purpose which, in an especial 
degree, commands the President's warm consid- 
eration. In this solicitude all patriotic Americans 
must share. And whatever wise measures you 
may initiate to carry your high purpose into effect 
cannot fail to find a response in all groups and 
sections and parties of our American people. 

In particular, as a schoolman and a member 
of the National Education Association, may I 
express my personal gratification that the Moth- 
ers' Congress is to be one of the organizations 
to be represented in the new Department of 
National Organizations of Women, which was 
authorized by the directors of that association at 



148 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

their meeting last summer in Los Angeles. The 
educational program of these several women's 
organizations is so well framed, and so much 
may be done by them to make that program 
operative in our educational systems, that your 
participation in our great National Association 
brings to it a promise of heightened usefulness. 
It is to be hoped that you may find your new 
relations with that association altogether helpful 
and congenial. May you be greatly successful 
in the educational projects to which so much 
of your effort has been consecrated. And may 
your meetings here in Washington happily further 
your plans for making a joyous childhood uni- 
versal in this land, as the best introduction to an 
honorable manhood and womanhood. 

Your purpose is, indeed, the broad purpose of 
our civilization. We are seeking to make a 
childhood of wholesome play lead up to a mature 
life of wholesome work from which the spirit of 
play has not been altogether lost. We think it 
worth while to provide for childhood with its 
play. We think it worth while to provide in a 
thousand ways for the work of grown-up years. 
But just at this time we are chiefly interested in 
the passage from the age of play to the age of 
work. That is the focus of some of our most 
anxious thought of to-day. The school is largely 
concerned with the transformation of a playing 
child into a working man with some of the play 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 149 

still left in him. So the question of which I speak 
is the question of the fitting together of the later 
years of school with the earlier years of work. 
Here is one of the most penetrating questions of 
our time, and one to which you may fairly de- 
vote your most earnest planning and study. 

It may not be necessary to show the danger 
of too abrupt a change from one mode of life to 
another. That danger has been often remarked. 
For example, it has been noted that the German 
system of higher education, under which a stu- 
dent passes at one bound from the close prescrip- 
tion and supervision of the gymnasium into the 
unlimited freedom of the university, is a system 
which subjects many a young student to an over- 
whelming moral disadvantage. Many lives are 
undoubtedly wrecked in that first year of unac- 
customed liberty. On the other hand, the Ger- 
man points to the hard lot of the American 
volunteer in time of war. Without preparation of 
any kind he is plunged from a life of peace into 
the hardest realities of a military life. It can- 
not be denied that physically and morally many 
young men have gone to pieces under such a 
strain. But what is to be said of a boy in his 
teens or a girl of the same age who in one day 
passes from a life in which there is no work to a 
life that is all work ? The physical strain of 
such a transition is great, but the moral strain is 
worse. Yet exactly the strain of such sudden 



150 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

change is what we have to guard against in the 
interest of great numbers of our people. 

Where our population is densely concentrated 
and the struggle for a living is hard, where in- 
dustry is organized in enormous units, in facto- 
ries and mines, and laborers are counted by the 
thousands or the tens of thousands, there the 
danger rises to its highest pitch. In a more scat- 
tered population and under industrial conditions 
of an earlier type, the danger is less threatening. 
There, in many individual instances, we may 
still see the passage from school and play to 
grown-up life and work accomplished in ways 
that are wholesome and very good to contemplate. 

It is natural for us to go back in thought to the 
course of our own lives. I trust I may be par- 
doned, accordingly, if I appeal for illustration to 
my own personal recollections. They take me 
back to a childhood on the farm and in a country 
village in northern Illinois. Before I was ten 
years old my village life had begun. Before I 
was eleven the ambition was moving me to take 
some share in the family burdens. I could see 
already that those burdens were pressing heavily 
on the father and mother. Our family life was an 
intimate one. We were all partners in the family 
fortunes. I had my regular round of small duties, 
known as chores, but I was eager to earn money 
and pay my part of the costs. So it came about 
that it was my own desire and no urgency what- 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 151 

ever on the part of my parents that made me a 
wage-earner in my eleventh year. After anxious 
searching and inquiry I found employment in the 
village, which did not interfere with the hours of 
school; in vacation time I began working on 
neighboring farms ; and before the year was out 
I had assumed the full responsibility of keeping 
myself in clothes. By a happy provision of na- 
ture, as I grew taller and it cost more to clothe 
me, I grew also stronger and my earning power 
increased. It was a proud moment when my 
wages were advanced from fifty to seventy-five 
cents a day. 

At a later time the home place grew larger, and 
I was needed there to do my part with other 
laborers. So I ceased to earn an independent in- 
come, and once more I was clothed from the 
family purse. Thus, with various alternations of 
work and schooling, and later with short terms 
of teaching school, the time went on until I was 
prepared to enter regularly upon my chosen 
profession. 

It was a happy life, on the whole. There was 
a fair amount of play in it, and I enjoyed the play 
a good deal more than the work. But there was 
interest, too, and pride in the work. The rest of 
the household were doing their part. There were 
warm neighborhood relationships. And in the 
home there was music and reading, with table-talk 
of politics, history, religion, and the daily news. 



152 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

It is plain to see that mine was not an isolated 
case. In many parts of the country it may be 
dupHcated with ten thousand variations to this 
day. Numerous records parallel with this, to all 
intents and purposes, may be found in the Con- 
gressional Directory. And if Who ^s Who gave 
biographical details concerning the first twenty 
years in the life of each of its inmates, such in- 
stances might be multiplied almost indefinitely. 

Let me repeat that the point to which attention 
is here particularly directed is the overlapping, 
or let us say the dovetailing, of school life with the 
life of a wage-earner and producer. Such over- 
lapping belongs to certain years between the ages 
of twelve and twenty-one. Leaving out of consid- 
eration now that small percentage of our people 
for whom schooling is still the main occupation 
of life for some years past the age of twenty-one, 
and speaking only of that greater number who 
have gon over to a life of labor before they have 
reached their majority, and many of them long 
before, I would present for your consideration 
this view : That for that larger proportion of our 
number ways should be sought by which their 
school life may be dovetailed into their life of 
toil. For one or two years at least, and preferably 
for a longer time, after the law permits them to 
work for pay, some part of their time should still 
be reserved for school. The ways by which this 
may be accomplished will be various, and some 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 153 

of them are still to be discovered. But, by what- 
ever ways may yet be found available, we must 
seek to prevent the sharp break from school life 
to a life of hard and unremitting labor, which is 
now too often the lot of boys and girls at the 
fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth year of their 
age. 

The more gradual and irregular transition of 
which my own boyhood is an ordinary example is 
in some ways better than any arrangement which 
can be deliberately provided, on a large scale, by 
legislation and administrative procedure. But in 
some ways it is not so good. There are surely 
methods to be found by which a closer interaction 
may be brought about between the schooling and 
the labor. Each may be made to give support to 
the other. Our national inventiveness should be 
equal to the demand for educational adjustments 
to meet this rising need. Already, in fact, such 
devices have begun to appear. In the great agri- 
cultural states of the West, many boys and young 
men are dividing their time between farm work 
in summer and studies in agricultural schools and 
colleges in winter. In the cities there are robust 
and ambitious young people who, even after full 
days of labor, give their evenings to attendance 
on evening schools. There are department stores 
in which a part of the time of the younger em- 
ployees is given to school pursuits in school rooms 
provided by their employers. At the University 



154 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

of Cincinnati and the Carnegie Technical Schools 
in Pittsburg, young men and boys divide their 
time between an apprenticeship in the shop and 
theoretical study in the class room. These 
varied experiments may be regarded as the skir- 
mish line of an advance which is to be of great 
significance for our national character and well- 
being. It is not too much to hope that laws may 
be devised and plans of organization carried into 
effect that will make a midway period, in which 
part schooling is required and part time labor is 
permitted, one of the most fruitful periods in all 
the educational years of youth. I do not look to 
see such a movement fall short of this consum- 
mation : That for all of our people there shall be 
schooling of some sort and in some amount 
through all the years up to the age of twenty-one ; 
and that this schooling in its later years shall have 
a more intimate bearing on the duties and occu- 
pations of life than we have yet been able to 
accomplish. 

But while we hold such hopes and expectations 
in all confidence, it is not to be forgotten that the 
immediate task is that of securing wise laws for 
compulsory education, joined with compulsory 
abstinence from unsuitable wage-earning work. 
There is clearly this need that the right to an 
education and freedom from those industrial 
conditions which would ruin the good results of 
education should both be provided by law. Of 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 155 

our forty-six states, thirty-five have now on their 
statute books laws varying greatly in their scope, 
for the accomplishment of both of these purposes ; 
on the other hand, one state has no laws for 
either of these purposes, and nine have either 
child labor laws or laws for compulsory education 
alone. The District of Columbia is not a satis- 
factory model for the rest of the country, for its 
improved statute for compulsory education is not 
yet matched with a statute for the regulation of 
child labor. This is a gap which it is hoped the 
present Congress will supply.^ 

Now, taking account only of those states in 
which there are both compulsory education laws 
and child labor laws side by side, let us note the 
relation between the close of the compulsory edu- 
cation period and the beginning of the permissive 
labor period. Some of our child labor laws assign 
different ages for different occupations, and none 
of them apply to all possible occupations. But 
speaking broadly, the present status of the case 
is about as follows: In eighteen of the states 
these two points coincide, that is, full-time em- 
ployment is permitted the day after full-time 
compulsory education ceases. In one of the states 
there is a gap of two years between the two. For 
many children such a gap is a period of danger, a 
much more serious danger, indeed, than that of 
the sudden step from school to gainful employ- 

* Congress has passed a child labor law since this was written. 



156 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ment; for children who may not take employ- 
ment for wages and are not required to go to 
school are subject to all of the evils of enforced 
idleness at an age when impulse is strong and 
control is weak and characters are ready to take 
their bent for life. In seven of the states this 
danger is met by a provision extending the age of 
compulsory school attendance in the case of chil- 
dren having no regular employment. In the re- 
maining seventeen of these states there is some 
form of overlapping of the compulsory schooling 
age and the permissive employment age. In these 
seventeen states there would seem, even at the 
present time, to be a fair opportunity for judicious 
experimentation with ways of making a better 
transition from the school to the work of life. 

More and more, however, it becomes clear that 
statutory provisions in these matters are not 
effective without well-developed systems of in- 
spection and enforcement. And if the best things 
are to be brought within reach, the enforcement 
of compulsory education laws must go hand in 
hand with the enforcement of compulsory non- 
labor laws. Such combined eflBciency is abso- 
lutely essential if the ends of which I have spoken 
are to be attained. With adequate guarantees on 
the sanitary and the educational side, it would be 
practicable, for many children in the middle of 
their 'teens, to place the school alongside of the 
factory or the shop, even under the same roof, and 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 157 

to have the pupils divide their time between the 
two. It is conceivable that such an arrangement 
might be made of incalculable advantage, not 
only to industry but equally to education. But 
it should not be considered for a moment without 
those adequate guarantees. In every way it would 
appear that any great progress in these matters 
is dependent upon a full and harmonious devel- 
opment of our systems of enforcement. It will 
be safe to make the laws flexible, to adapt them to 
a great variety of conditions, in proportion as their 
administration becomes exact and dependable. 
To strengthen these provisions on the adminis- 
trative side is accordingly one of our chief con- 
cerns at this time ; and this is notably the case, I 
may repeat, if any such intimate combination of 
industry and education as is here proposed for a 
transition period is to be made a safe and sane 
and practicable undertaking. 

Passing now from this more special considera- 
tion of the transition period in the lives of our 
future workers, permit me to remind you of the 
present urgency of the whole problem of our 
school attendance. After all of the efforts that 
have been put forth — compulsory attendance 
laws, varied attractions in the studies offered, and 
public opinion pressing upon indifferent parents 
— our school attendance is still far behind what 
it should be. At a fair estimate every one of our 
people should receive at least eight years of school- 



158 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ing of approximately two hundred days to the 
year. As a matter of fact, we fall far short of this 
standard. In the year 1905 the average schooling 
per individual of the population for the whole 
country was only 5.33 years. In the North At- 
lantic Division, including the New England and 
Middle Atlantic states, this average went as high 
as 7.09 years. In the South Central Division it 
was only 3.06 years. In both cases it was far too 
low, and it is evident that a great task is still 
before us to bring this amount up to anything like 
the point that it should reach. When we try to 
realize the meaning of the figures, to understand 
how many children have been kept from their 
educational inheritance, we are oppressed with 
the waste of warm, human life and opportunity 
which such a showing signifies. Yet the figures 
offer encouragement, too. While the present 
averages are painfully low, they represent a long- 
continued improvement. The showing of an 
average of 5.33 years of schooling per individual 
of the population in the year 1905 should be set 
over against an average of 3.96 years in the year 
1880. This advance of 35 per cent within the 
term of twenty-five years is a notable gain when 
we remember that the total number of persons to 
be educated had increased at a rapid rate within 
the same period. In the South Central Division, 
which shows the lowest average at this time, the 
improvement has been notably rapid, amount- 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 159 

ing to 65 per cent within this twenty-five-year 
period. 

When we turn from the figures for broad 
sections of our land to a closer examination of rep- 
resentative cities, we find both stimulus and en- 
couragement in another form. Here we have the 
significant tables recently prepared by Professor 
Thorndike to show the dwindling of public school 
classes from the lower to the higher grades of the 
school. The showing here is disheartening if we 
consider only such facts as these : That one-half 
of the pupils, generally speaking, have left school 
before the eighth grade is reached, and only 40 
per cent go through to the end of the elementary 
school. But when, on the other hand, we see 
what progress some of our cities have made, we 
take new courage for the rest. While in the 
mean or average the cities show over half of the 
pupils dropping out before the eighth grade is 
entered, twelve cities out of twenty-three already 
carry more than half of their pupils through the 
seventh grade, seven carry more than half of them 
through the eighth grade, and two, at least, carry 
a majority of their pupils through the ninth 
grade and over into the high school. There is 
reason, then, for solicitude, and reason as well 
for hope.* 

* Since the above was written, Professor Thorndike's re- 
sults have been sharply criticised, but even the figures pre- 
sented by Mr. Leonard P. Ayres, one of the keenest of the 



160 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

What one city or a few cities have done 
other cities may do. This is the word to be 
passed on to those parents' associations in con- 
nection with pubUc schools which the Mothers' 
Congress has promoted — a form of association 
of the greatest promise in the way of educational 
improvement. All manner of co-operation and 
moral influence must be added to all manner of 
legal and administrative compulsion to bring 
about the desirable uplift of our schools in this 
matter of attendance. But such combination of 
favoring influence has even now accomplished 
notable improvements, which have been seen and 
measured and recorded. So much the more may 
we expect that the efforts of the immediate future 
will have their wished-for reward. 

The point cannot be too strongly emphasized 
that the importance of these various statistics lies 
in the human values that they represent. We 
are concerned with the difference that it makes 
in a human life to have eight full years of school- 
ing in a good school, as compared with three or 
four fragmentary years in some half-organized 
makeshift for a school, or even less than that and 
with no school at all. We are concerned with 
these values in individual lives, and we are look- 
ing beyond to the great interests of the com- 

critics (Laggards in our schools, pp. 66-72) show only about 
fifty per cent of the pupils completing the elementary school 
course. 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 161 

mon wealth and the nation. As regards school 
attendance and child labor and all of those high 
interests to which your organization has devoted 
its attention, these human values, these state and 
national interests, come before us with compelling 
power. 

These interests cannot fall short of a national 
significance, for it is the oncoming citizenship 
of the nation with which they have to do. 
The nation cannot look with unconcern on those 
things that affect its fundamental character and 
endurance. It is not my purpose here to discuss 
any of the ways which have been proposed to give 
effect to the national concern in these matters 
through governmental action. I shall do no more 
than express my conviction that this national 
concern is too deep and genuine to fail of finding 
suitable expression. It is not to be supposed for 
a moment that the nation will do aught to weaken 
the hands of the states in dealing with the present 
situation. But the nation has much to do that 
will strengthen the hands of the states, and will 
work to the betterment of that great body of 
young citizens who are the hope alike of the 
states and of the nation. 

The great need is that the opportunity for 
sound growth and education shall be equalized 
for our children and our youth throughout the 
land. If opportunity is the very thing that our 
democracy means, then we must realize democ- 

11 



162 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

racy, as far as possible, by making the opportunity 
of the child born in one part of the land as fair 
and encouraging as that of the child born in any 
other part of the land. This, in large part, must 
be the responsibility of governments, both state 
and national. But as preparatory to govern- 
mental provisions, and as holding the ground till 
governments can act with full effect, there is a 
great work to be done by private and co-opera- 
tive agencies. And when governments have done 
their best there will still be large responsibilities 
devolving on such agencies. Your influential 
society and other women's societies that share in 
these undertakings — they can do much to fur- 
ther that equalizing of opportunity which our 
America still so sorely needs. 

Thus far we have considered the interests of 
children in the United States with reference, 
first, to the connection of school life with life in 
the world of work, and in the second place to the 
whole question of attendance upon the schools. 
Before I close may I go back to that earlier and 
still more difficult problem, which has been given 
a prominent place among the aims and purposes 
of this Congress, the problem of preparation for 
mother-work ? I would not venture to advise 
you with reference to an education which should 
fit women for their part as mothers in the home. 
That is a high theme in which others may learn 
from you. What I should like to urge upon 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 163 

your consideration is a narrower and lowlier 
calling, yet one which may conceivably become 
of large significance in the life of our people. 

Under modern conditions there is need for a 
great deal of mothering by those who are not 
mothers themselves, a need for foster-mothering, 
if the term may be permitted. In orphanages, 
in day nurseries, in social settlements, in homes 
from which the mother has been taken, or in 
which the living mother is unable to carry all 
the burdens of her position, there is to-day a 
wide demand for the services of young women 
who are expert in the care of little children from 
the first month of babyhood to the age for kinder- 
garten or school. This demand is met for the 
most part by those who have had no special 
training for the task, because such special train- 
ing is nowhere to be found. We have trained 
kindergartners and trained hospital nurses. Some 
little beginning has been made in the training of 
nursery maids at babies' hospitals. In Ghent 
and Paris and London there are schools for 
mothers among the very poor. But none of 
these exactly meet the case. What is proposed, 
in effect, is this: That as in recent years the 
profession of kindergartner and the profession of 
hospital nurse have been created, so now an- 
other new profession for women be established, 
the profession of babies' nurse or nursery gov- 
erness. As a profession it would require its 



164 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

training schools, its professional literature, its 
societies maintaining a professional spirit and 
atmosphere. The training would, in part, re- 
semble that of the hospital nurse, in part it 
would draw near to that of the kindergartner, 
in part it would be different from either, a special 
training for this new profession alone. A lead- 
ing place should necessarily be given to the care 
of the little ones' health and particularly to the 
problem of nourishment. But there should be 
a place, too, for the principles of baby education, 
which might consist mainly of the prevention of 
too much education and the securing of a healthy 
nervous system, capable of standing the strain 
that school life will put upon it in after years. 

There is, however, no need to elaborate de- 
tails, for these in any case must be supplied for 
the most part by the teaching of experience. So 
far as the main contention is concerned, I am 
persuaded that there is room for this new pro- 
fession and that it will quickly make a place for 
itself as soon as a school for such training is pro- 
vided. In commending such a plan to your 
consideration let me add that the largest useful- 
ness of schools for foster-mothers would un- 
doubtedly come in time to be their indirect 
service — their returning wave of influence upon 
that subtler and more diflBcult preparation for 
real motherhood. That there should be schools 
and a profession in which the varied knowledge 



CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 165 

needed for the care of the youngest children is 
regularly assembled and communicated — such a 
circumstance could not fail to have the deepest 
interest for mothers everywhere, who have the 
most intense and personal desire to know what 
may be known for their children's good. To 
give form and coherence and practical effec- 
tiveness to the knowledge of baby life and the 
life of the little child, even though it were done 
in the first instance for the training only of nurses, 
would be in the end a service rendered to all 
motherhood. 

It is with the greatest diffidence and deference 
that I bring these few suggestions to you, upon 
whom the real responsibilities and honors of 
mother-work have rested. You will undoubtedly 
devise wise and liberal things for the children 
of our land, for no one feels their needs more 
keenly than you, or seeks more earnestly to supply 
those needs. Knowing the full weight of anxious 
care for your own, you have learned to care for 
the good of all those who are under the simple, 
common, universal need of childhood through- 
out the land. And we who must bear those 
burdens in other ways come to you, deeply mind- 
ful of all that the ministry of mother and of wife 
have meant in our own homes, and look to you 
with confidence for help in those large under- 
takings for the welfare of all children with which 
our state and national governments have to do. 



X 

TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 

An Address delivered under the title, The Relation of the 
Home to Moral and Religious Education^ before the 
Religious Education Association at its Meeting in 
Rochester, New York, February 6, 1907. Published 
under that title in the Proceedings of the Association, 
and under the "present title in The Independent, April 
18, 1907. 



X 

TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 

EVERY improvement in education involves 
many factors, and, in the discussion of 
the plan proposed in this paper, I shall 
find it necessary to make occasional digressions 
with a view to noting some of the attendant cir- 
cumstances which seem to me to condition any 
successful experiment in the field we are to 
consider. 

I find it necessary, in fact, to begin with a di- 
gression. Attention should be called at the outset 
to the extreme diflSculty of making effective any 
really new departure in education. Every new 
educational process or institution shows in a 
marked degree the same conservative tendency 
which made the first railway coaches take the 
form of the stage-coach, which they superseded, 
until they had developed slowly and painfully 
new forms of their own ; the tendency which made 
some of the earlier experiments in the use of iron 
and steel in architectural construction take the 
form of columns and pilasters cast in the mould 
of the old Greek orders. This tendency to as- 



170 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

similate the new to the old, in such a way as to 
delay or even defeat the purpose of the new, 
takes on a special phase in the domain of edu- 
cation. The success of the school depends upon 
the teacher. When a new type of school is pro- 
jected, there are generally at hand few teachers, 
if even a single teacher, who possess the requisite 
combination of training, experience, and a clear 
conception of the new purpose, to do the new 
work effectively. The problem of bringing a 
new educational plan into full force and effect 
is accordingly the problem of getting the new 
purpose clearly in mind, and then of provid- 
ing the requisite training and apprenticeship 
for the teachers who will do the work. So far 
as the teachers are concerned, the difficulty rises 
even to a difficulty in the second degree; for 
if the new work is to be widely extended, one 
must consider not only the question of the supply 
of teachers, but the question of providing teach- 
ers of teachers. 

For reasons which will appear later in this dis- 
cussion, I should like now to limit my topic to a 
very small division of the general field. For the 
present, let us leave altogether out of considera- 
tion the great majority of our American homes, 
in which the burden of the earliest physical care 
and moral and religious training of the children 
will rest almost exclusively upon the mother of 
the family, and concern ourselves simply with 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 171 

those homes in which a children's nurse or gov- 
erness is employed. That is, I should like to 
consider the question at first merely as a question 
concerning the training of nurses for very young 
children. At first sight, it will seem that this is 
limiting the question to one affecting the homes 
of the rich. I should say rather that it is limiting 
the question to one affecting the homes of the rich, 
motherless homes, and the homes of the very 
poor ; for w ith the development of a great vari- 
ety of college and neighborhood "settlements" 
in our large cities, and with the increasing 
clearness of educational purpose in institutions 
for orphans and other unfortunate children, 
the range of employment for such children's 
nurses as I have in mind will undoubtedly be 
very greatly extended. In this we find a parallel 
in the history of American kindergartens. Before 
the kindergarten becomes a part of the public 
school system, it exists in two forms: as an in- 
stitution for the children of the rich (the ''pay" 
kindergarten) and an institution for the children 
of the very poor (the free kindergarten). In 
more ways than one, indeed, the plan which I 
am venturing to propose will have somewhat 
the character of a downward extension of the 
kindergarten into the earliest years of the life of 
the child. 

But this is not all. It is to be remembered 
that the moral education of very young children 



172 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

is most intimately bound up with their physical 
welfare. In fact, the question of survival and 
of physical health must be kept at the front in 
this earliest period, and the beginnings which 
are made at this time in the cultivation of a gen- 
erally wholesome disposition, and of those regular 
habits in eating, sleeping, and related activities 
which have much to do with the welfare of the 
nervous system, are at the same time both physi- 
cal and moral. It is accordingly desirable that 
in training for this service we should break away 
from the narrower traditions of the kindergarten. 
Many good precedents may be drawn from the 
training of nurses in hospitals and sanitariums, 
but even such precedents must be used with 
caution. 

It is to our purpose, however, to note the en- 
couragement which may be drawn for such an 
undertaking as this from the history of the 
education of nurses in this country. Within the 
memory of those here present, the nurse called 
in to help when the household had been invaded 
by long-continued illness was either a neighbor 
or a servant. Except in a few hospitals, the 
trained nurse, as we now understand the term, 
was unknown. The occupation was lacking in 
definite standards. Those who followed it 
lacked professional spirit or other esprit de corps. 
Now these conditions are rapidly changing, and 
the schools for nurses are bringing about the 



TIIAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 173 

change. In the year 1901 there were 448 of 
these schools reporting to the Bureau of Educa- 
tion, with an attendance of 11,599 students. 
Five years later, these numbers had increased 
to 964 schools and about 20,000 students. These 
schools are rapidly advancing their standards of 
admission and of scholastic and practical train- 
ing. Already the best of them are worthy of 
attentive study from the point of view of our 
normal schools, because of their handling of the 
persistent normal school problem, that of the 
union of theory with practice. The nurses have 
their associations, their periodical and other 
publications. In ten states laws have been 
passed for their registration. In the state of 
New York, in particular, under the administra- 
tion of the department of education, the course 
of training provided in different schools has been 
unified and strengthened. If nursing is not a 
profession as medicine is a profession, it has 
come to have something of the professional 
character and spirit. And the public is greatly 
the gainer by the change. 

It is one great merit of a vocational school of 
any kind that it stamps this professional character 
upon the occupation for which it prepares. By 
professional character, I mean that ingrained 
regard for standards and ideas, for special knowl- 
edge and special skill, which marks the profes- 
sional man ; and his readiness to put the claims 



174 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

of public service and of intrinsic excellence of 
performance above considerations of private 
gain. As compared with any kind of apprentice- 
ship, a vocational school makes for such profes- 
sional spirit, by combining the instruction of 
specialists in different fields, by referring proces- 
ses to guiding ideas and cultivating practice in 
its connection with theory, by organizing a co- 
herent course of training, by making a center of 
information relating to recent improvements in 
its particular craft. 

Not only does the school prepare for the vo- 
cation more quickly and more thoroughly than 
any ordinary form of apprenticeship, but it 
tends to improve more rapidly in its methods 
and appliances. If schools for nurses of the sick 
have raised an irregular occupation into some- 
thing so like a profession as we have seen them 
do within these few past years, it seems not 
incredible that schools for the nurses of little 
children may do as much within as brief a period. 
It is the establishment of such schools, or of 
special courses for this purpose in universities 
and other institutions, that is proposed in this 
discussion. 

The difficulties to be met in the making of 
such schools are undoubtedly very great. The 
baby nurse of to-day is ordinarily a servant, and 
often a foreigner chosen because her speech is 
that of Paris or Hanover. It would seem as 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 175 

if the superficial demand were for the right 
accent rather than for skill in the care and nur- 
ture of the little ones. The real demand is for 
a variety of knowledge and of judgment. Nu- 
trition, the prevention of disease, proper care in 
minor ailments (for the nurse for the sick must 
be the main reliance in serious illnesses), the 
correction of faults of temper and disposition, 
the first steps in learning, supervision of games, 
the telling of stories, the first hint of the mysteries 
of religion — the range of such requirements is 
very great indeed. And since the service re- 
quired is part physical, part educational, part 
maternal and spiritual, there is no one profes- 
sional superior who shall guide the practice of 
the infant nurse. She is not, like the nurse of 
the sick, a physician's assistant and under the 
immediate guidance of the family's medical 
adviser. She must take her directions and ad- 
vice, first of all, from the parents, if they are at 
hand to direct; but also from the physician, the 
pastor, if there be a pastor, perhaps the teacher, 
if the family has taken the teacher into such 
close relations with its inner life; and, most of 
all, must take counsel with herself, and draw on 
the resources which she has made her own. 

No good movement ever had a beginning. No 
matter w^here we may start in, we find that it is 
already begun. I have been unable as yet to find 
notice of any existing institution which exactly 



176 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

fills the role which is suggested in this paper. 
Yet the beginnings have undoubtedly been made. 
Professor Charles R. Henderson has called my 
attention to two institutions in Paris which are 
at least closely related to such training schools 
as are here contemplated. One is the Ecole des 
Meres, which was founded by Mme. Augusta 
Moll- Weiss at Bordeaux in 1897 and removed 
to Paris in 1904. This school provides a section 
for professors and women of the higher classes; 
a second section for women intending to enter 
household service as nurses, cooks, etc. ; a third 
section for women of the w^orking classes ; and a 
fourth section for instruction in domestic econ- 
omy and management of the home. Its pur- 
poses are extremely varied. It is intended to 
prepare young women directly for duties as 
heads of families, to prepare others to become 
teachers of domestic economy, and to give in- 
struction to working women in such economic 
and ethical principles as may be of importance 
for them to understand, in practical hygiene, 
sanitation, etc. 

Another Parisian institution is known as the 
Consultations respecting Nurslings (Consulta- 
tions de Nourrissons) , and is conducted by Pro- 
fessor Budin of the Faculty of Medicine of the 
University of Paris, in connection with the 
maternity section of a Paris hospital. These 
consultations are intended to give to young 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 177 

mothers practical information respecting the 
nourishment and care of their infants. 

My attention has also been called to an ex- 
tremely interesting article in the Nineteenth 
Century for December, 1906, by a member of 
the Women's Co-operative Guild, on the " Ghent 
School for Mothers." This school, conducted by 
Doctor Miele in connection with the Bureau de 
Bienfaisance, was started about five years ago, 
and is evidently carrying on a work of the greatest 
interest. The services which it renders include 
dispensaries for babies, a milk depot, health 
talks to mothers, a course of training for girls, 
and also some theoretical instruction in the care 
of infants and practice in a number of creches. 

In an open letter relating to " Unskilled 
Mothers," Mrs. Florence Kelley, in the Cen- 
tury Magazine for February, 1907, tells of the 
Association of Practical Housekeeping Centers, 
which was incorporated in the City of New York 
in February, 1906, and does a valuable work in 
the homes of the poor of Manhattan and Brook- 
lyn. Incidentally, Mrs. Kelley tells in this letter 
of the instruction provided by the County Coun- 
cil of London for school children in cottages 
altogether similar to those in which they live. 
One of the Mosely party of teachers who recently 
visited the Bureau of Education has given further 
information w ith reference to this cottage instruc- 
tion. It is carried on in the neighborhood of an 

12 



178 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

elementary school, and gives to young girls prac- 
tical experience, under conditions much like 
those found in their own homes, in the ordinary 
duties of housekeeping. 

The Englishwoman's Year Book and Direc- 
tory for 1903, the latest issue I have at hand, con- 
tains notices of the Sesame House for Home Life 
Training and for the Training of Kindergarten 
Mistresses and Lady Nurses, at St. John's 
Wood; and of the Norland Institute in London 
and the Liverpool Ladies' Sanitary Association, 
at both of which *' ladies are trained as nurses for 
children." 

Coming nearer home, we find at the Babies' 
Hospital of the City of New York a training 
school for nursery maids which has been in 
operation for the past sixteen years. The recently 
published report of this hospital, for the year 
ending September 30, 1906, contains interesting 
information wdth reference to this course of 
training. At the time of this report, there were 
27 pupils in the school. The course of instruc- 
tion and training covers the subjects of infant 
feeding, bathing, hygiene of skin, nursery hy- 
giene, training of children in proper bodily habits, 
miscellaneous subjects, nursery emergencies, and 
the rudiments of kindergarten work. Thirty- 
four nurses were graduated from this school in 
the class of 1906. The following additional in- 
formation concerning the school is conveyed in 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 179 

a very interesting letter recently received from 
the secretary of the medical board of the Babies' 
Hospital, Doctor L. Emmett Holt: 

The girls received are from twenty to twenty-five years 
of age. The course is eight months; six in the hospital 
and two months in private famihes on probation after 
leaving the hospital. Nurses receive $7 a month during 
their training. There are trained annually about thirty- 
five nurses. Nurses receive after graduation $25 a month 
the first year. After this most of them receive $30. The 
applications for nurses are greatly in excess of the supply 
and are often as many as one thousand in a single year. 

Doctor Holt adds that nurses are trained 
in a somewhat similar way at the following 
institutions : 

Infants' Hospital in Boston; 

St. Margaret's Home, Albany; 

The Babies' Hospital, Newark, New Jersey; 

St. Christopher's Hospital, Brooklyn; 

The Pittsburg Home for Babies, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; 

and that there are other similar schools in San 
Francisco and Buffalo. I have, however, no 
further information with reference to these other 
schools. 

The New York Evening Post of December 
26, 1906, contained a notice of courses which are 
given by the Harlem Young Women's Christian 
Association. These courses, it seems, are in- 
tended for the training of "kindergarten nurses." 
To be admitted to such courses the girls must 



180 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

be more than eighteen years of age and must 
have had a high school education or its equiva- 
lent. A certificate is awarded at the end of four 
months of satisfactory study, but the full course 
is eight months in length.^ 

There are doubtless other experiments which 
are in the making and have not yet come to my 
knowledge. It will be found, I think, that the 
ground is prepared for such an undertaking as 
has been outlined above. But what has thus far 
been done is in the nature of pioneering, of 
scouting as it were, and the real systematic ad- 
vance is yet to be made. It may well be believed 
that the time for such definite advance is al- 
ready at hand. 

Just what is to be attempted and just how it 
is to be accomplished are not altogether clear. 
But these things seem clear at least, that the 
training to be given should join theory with 
practice, and that the work must be partly peda- 
gogical and partly parallel to that of the ordinary 
nurses' training school. For the purposes of 

* There has come to my notice, since the above was written, 
a most interesting volume of over five hundred pages, entitled 
"L'education domestique des jeunes filles," by Louis Frank 
(Librairie Larousse, Paris, [1904 ?]). Chapter III, on *' La science 
des meres," contains interesting information concerning schools 
somewhat similar in character and aim to those here proposed. 
The author speaks warmly of the "kitchen gardens" devised in 
this country some twenty-five or thirty years ago by Miss Emily 
Huntington. 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 181 

practice, it seems desirable that the student should 
have access to a babies' hospital, a foundlings' 
home, a day nursery, or some other institution 
in which there are children to be cared for. The 
theoretical instruction can probably best be 
given in connection with a college or university. 
The diflficulty of working out any standard course 
of systematic training is obvious, yet is no greater 
than other difficulties which have been met and 
overcome in the course of our educational devel- 
opment. The problem is accordingly referred 
to the departments of education and of hygiene 
of our women's colleges, and of universities to 
which women are admitted, in the confidence 
that, like Sentimental Tommy, they will "find 
a w'y." 

I look to see the problem ultimately solved by 
such institutions as these, in co-operation with 
hospitals and other institutions for the actual 
care of infants, rather than in institutions of the 
latter class apart from colleges and universities ; 
for the training which is here proposed is edu- 
cational in its relationships and purposes, and is 
intended to attract young women whose pre- 
liminary training fits them at least for admission 
to the higher institutions. It may, indeed, be 
found that the demands of practice will so far 
outweigh other considerations as to make it 
necessary to conduct all of the courses in con- 
nection with the institutions where the babies 



182 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

themselves are to be found, rather than in the 
class rooms of the ordinary college. None of the 
effort which may be put forth by institutions 
other than colleges and hospitals to this same 
end will be lost. The mdest experimentation 
i^\dll be needed, and the labor of the pioneer, in 
this as in other fields, will be not only necessary 
but also deeply interesting. 

If I have said nothing as yet of the training of 
mothers, on whom the care and culture of baby 
children must chiefly rest, it is because such train- 
ing is particularly difiicult to compass by any 
direct approach. However much young women 
may look forward, in a wholesome way, to the 
responsibilities of motherhood, I believe the most 
of them would shrink from any course of training 
intended expressly to prepare them for those 
responsibilities. If such an attitude commonly 
appears, we may declare it to be unreasonable, 
but we must reckon with it as a fact. It is, indeed, 
an attitude which finds some justification in sim- 
ple human nature. It seems to me very doubtful 
whether a course in school or college expressly 
intended to fit young women to be wise mothers 
of little children would have much chance of 
success. But I do believe that a professional 
course, intended to fit young women for the 
vocation of children's nurse, would have a much 
better chance of success. It is reasonable to ex- 
pect that when such courses are well started they 



TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 183 

will be largely attended, and that those who have 
taken them and received certificates or diplomas 
showing that they have pursued them success- 
fully, will find employment in abundance await- 
ing them. Still further, it is not unreasonable to 
hope that when the vocation of baby nurse or 
nursery matron or whatever it may be called, 
shall have become a well-established profession, 
its influence will spread abroad in many desirable 
ways. Some of these graduates will become 
teachers of classes of young mothers in college 
settlements and Young Women's Christian As- 
sociations. Many of them will marry and will 
carry their knowledge and skill into homes of 
their own. Some young women, already be- 
trothed, will take the course of training with no 
other thought than that of fitting themselves for 
the homes that are to be theirs. And it may be 
that the special course will gradually lead the 
way to some more general form of education for 
the life of the home, which may find its place and 
do its beneficent work in all our schools and col- 
leges for women. 

If I have said little in this paper of the reli- 
gious side of the training here proposed, it is not 
that I regard the religious side as of subordinate 
importance. But in these earliest years, it is 
surely desirable that any over-emphasis of the re- 
ligious consciousness should be carefully avoided. 
The simple and sincere suggestion of religious 



184 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

conceptions which may safely be attempted 
should be joined with an equally wholesome 
mental and physical life, and particularly a life 
of wholesome companionships, which is the best 
assurance of all right-mindedness in the later 
years of childhood. 



XI 

THE WORK OF WOMEN'S ORGANIZA- 
TIONS IN EDUCATION 

Read at the first Meeting of the Department of National 
Organizations of Women of the National Education 
Association, at Cleveland, Ohio, July 2, 1908. Pub- 
lished in the Proceedings of the Association for the year 
1908. 



XI 



THE WORK OF WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS 
IN EDUCATION 

FOR those who wish to see the National 
Education Association represent our edu- 
cational interests in the broadest way, a 
peculiar significance attaches to the launching 
of this new department. An educational work 
of large significance and varied character, already 
in full progress, is here brought into connection 
with the comprehensive undertakings of this As- 
sociation. While the responsibility for the estab- 
lishment of the new department is widely shared, 
I should like at this time to recall in particular the 
part taken by Miss Mary N. Abbott, of Water- 
town, Connecticut, who shortly before her death 
had been laboring with great faith and devotion, 
to bring about the arrangement which has here 
been consummated. I saw her but once, when 
she was devoting her best energies to this under- 
taking, and I had never known her aside from 
this enterprise; but I was much impressed with 
the really religious earnestness which she brought 
to her task. That spirit, I am sure, is shared by 
many others, and it gives promise that this depart- 



188 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

merit is to be one of the most useful branches of 
our general organization. 

In the beginnings of modern schooHng, a great 
deal depended upon the labors of unpaid or- 
ganizers and overseers, mostly women, whose 
benevolent spirit found in the support and im- 
provement of schools its best way of discharging 
the responsibility of the well-to-do toward the 
poor of their neighborhood. Those who have 
read that interesting work. The Gurneys of 
Earlham, by Augustus J. C. Hare, will recall 
the conscientious devotion to the education of the 
poor displayed by different members of the Gur- 
ney family, and particularly by its most con- 
spicuous member, Mrs. Elizabeth Fry. There 
is much of the same sort to be found in the per- 
sonal histories of eighteenth- and early nineteenth- 
century England, and the same spirit reappears 
in the early education societies of our Amer- 
ican cities, in New York, in Boston, and in 
Philadelphia. 

In both England and America the upgrowth of 
well-ordered systems of public education threw 
endeavors of this kind into an eclipse. In place 
of schools supported, with the greatest difficulty, 
by private subscription, there appeared schools 
established by law and maintained by taxation. 
Teaching became both a professional occupa- 
tion and a branch of the civil service. The re- 
sponsibility for everything educational, at least 



ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 189 

for everything in the nature of public and organ- 
ized education, was shifted to a body of profes- 
sional servants of the commonwealth. The edu- 
cational societies went out of existence, as did 
the American x\nti-slavery Society when the 
thirteenth amendment to our Constitution was 
adopted. The contributions and the benevolent 
activities of those who had carried the burden of 
schools were transferred to other charities. Edu- 
cation had simply ceased to be an eleemosynary 
and missionary enterprise, and had become a part 
of the ordinary administration of state and local 
governments. 

Now, it is plain to see that, while education 
gained a great deal more than it lost by the 
change, the loss was real and serious. Fortu- 
nately, the professional teachers who took up the 
educational burden were themselves human as 
well as professional. Some of the finest devotion 
to the welfare of little children and to the wider 
purpose of the public weal appears to-day in 
their activities. It is necessary to their best 
service that as they become more professional 
they should become more than professional, and 
many of them have come up unfailingly to this 
higher plane. But it takes large natures to carry 
out so large a program, and it is not surprising 
that it has been done with var^^ng degrees of 
success. The best teachers of all see most clearly 
this need, that new ways shall be found of bring- 



190 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ing to the support of the modern public school 
some of those finer forces of our community life 
that once made the school and kept it alive. 

Matters which lie wholly in the field of science 
— the method of constructing a bridge, of testing 
our milk or water supply, of combating an epi- 
demic, of determining a question of legal right — 
these things are professional; and extra-profes- 
sional interference in such affairs would do more 
harm than good. In education, too, there is a 
large field of professional knowledge, in which 
interference by the general public or even by a 
board of education representing the public, could 
only do more harm than good. Within its limits, 
the professional judgment of the trained and ex- 
perienced teacher is to be more scrupulously 
respected to-day than ever before. Not a book 
should be placed in the school library nor a pic- 
ture on the schoolroom wall, no society, no 
matter how good its object, should be formed 
within the school under pressure from without, 
no special method nor device of teaching nor of 
government should be imposed upon the school, 
unless it have the approval of the teaching force 
within the school. 

It is when we come into the field of morals that 
every man is responsible for a judgment of his 
own, and cannot shift it to the shoulders of an- 
other. And education in one of its main aspects 
is essentially a question of morals. It is a ques- 



ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 191 

tion in which the professional point of view can- 
not pre-empt the whole field, and in which the 
non-professional citizen is morally bound to have 
opinions of his own. Every public question, in 
like manner, has a moral side. The building of 
bridges, the conduct of dairies, the practice of the 
physician and the attorney, these are questions to 
which the common citizen cannot be indifferent. 

We have then a large range of activities in 
which the professional teacher should clearly 
have the right of way, and an equally clear out- 
lying territory, of great importance, in which we 
are dealing, not with professional responsibility 
but with moral and community responsibility. 
And these two are fringed in together in an inter- 
mediate shadow-land where some of the most 
vital questions of to-day are found. 

This new department deals with that outlying 
field and with that indeterminate shadow-land. 
Its relation to the schools is non-professional and 
moral. It is to further a return to the side of 
popular education of those benevolent and mis- 
sionary endeavors which were once the main 
support of popular education. But we are to 
remember that in the intervening years the spirit 
of the benevolent missionary has changed. The 
spirit which did things for others for their good 
has been transformed into the spirit which does 
things with others for the common good. In this 
old spirit, renewed and remade, it is to be hoped 



192 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

that the department you have inaugurated may 
become a rallying point for those good influ- 
ences in our communities which seek to find ways 
of working for and with the common schools. 

It is right that women should lead in this cause. 
They have shown capacity for such leadership. 
But it is to be hoped that men and women alike 
who desire that the non-professional responsi- 
bility of our communities for public education 
shall be adequately discharged — that all of those 
who have a mind to make education of more 
worth in their communities than it has been at 
the best hitherto — shall know better what to do 
and shall do it with better courage for the en- 
lightenment which this department can give. 

You will not expect my suggestions to take the 
form of a detailed program of topics for your con- 
sideration. Much of your work has already been 
blocked out by the societies that are here repre- 
sented. Much of it must arise to meet the special 
need and occasion. The general platform on 
which you had met by common agreement be- 
fore this department was organized, embodies a 
number of the most important proposals for edu- 
cational improvement on which the friends of ed- 
ucation generally are agreed. In these matters 
your work is that of bringing into effective prom- 
inence a number of improvements in which at 
least a passive unanimity has already been 
secured. 



ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 193 

I should like, however, to indicate a general 
line of advance in the educational affairs of our 
larger centers of population, a plan which is ex- 
tremely simple and yet must be regarded for the 
present as somewhat visionary. I should like 
to see all of the teachers organized for the con- 
sideration, from time to time, of definite proposals 
for the improvement of the schools; and all of 
the parents of school children organized, with 
other interested citizens, for a similar purpose. 
Without hampering our educational authorities 
in any of their ordinary work, and without re- 
lieving them of their ultimate responsibility for all 
of the work of the schools, an informal and habit- 
ual referendum might well be agreed upon, under 
which all proposals for far-reaching changes in 
the plan of education should be considered at 
length by these two independent bodies. All 
manner of conference and co-operation between 
the two should take place, and certain committees 
of conference and certain other organizations 
should include teachers and parents on equal 
terms. 

Endless delays should, of course, be avoided; 
but by some such arrangement as this we might 
be reasonably sure that no sweeping change 
should be made in our systems of education till 
it should be fairly well understood by those 
who, next to the pupils themselves, are most 
concerned with the experiment. 

13 



194 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

But such an arrangement should not only pre- 
vent sudden and ill-considered change. It should 
prevent long-continued and equally ill-considered 
lack of change. We need to keep the spirit of in- 
vention alive in our school systems, for new times 
call for new measures. In both of the bodies to 
which I have referred the spirit of initiative 
should be fostered. In education as in other fields 
the great majority of new inventions fail and 
ought to fail. But the hundredth one or the 
thousandth, that is a thing of great price. Let 
the body of non-professional friends of educa- 
tion be one in which a premium is placed upon 
suggestions for improvement and reform. Let 
fair consideration be given to suggestions of this 
kind. If they are widely approved, let them be 
passed on to the body of practical teachers for a 
second approval, or for modification or rejection. 
Or let the procedure be turned about, as the occa- 
sion may demand. But let us through this means 
have, from year to year, proposals sent up to the 
education authorities which shall represent not 
merely the half-baked enthusiasm of some bright 
leader who has won a sudden following, but the 
conviction of those who have looked into the 
matter with care and conscience, some of them 
from the side of what the community wants, and 
some from the side of what the schools can do. 

My own suggestion, as you see, is none too 
thoroughly wrought out as yet, and it has not yet 



ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 195 

run the gantlet of either a body of teachers or a 
body of friendly neighbors of the school. I hope 
it may have criticism, however, from both of 
these sides. And I venture to put it forward here 
as one of the many proposals for the good of our 
education which you are to discuss to some good 
purpose in this first meeting of your department. 



XII 

THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF 

UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 

IN THE PREPARATION OF 

TEACHERS 

Read at the Meeting of the National Council of Education 
at Cleveland, Ohio, June 30, 1908. Published in the 
Proceedings of the National Education Association for 
the year 1908, and in Education for September, 1908. 



XII 



THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF UNIVERSITY 
AND NORMAL SCHOOL IN THE PREPARA- 
TION OF TEACHERS 

WHAT I have to present may be summed 
up as follows: The chief difficulty of 
adjustment from the side of the nor- 
mal school arises from the fact that the normal 
school seems to be out of the main current of 
our scholastic life, which flows from the ele- 
mentary school through the high school directly 
into the university or, the other way round, 
from the university to the secondary and ele- 
mentary school. 

The chief difficulty of adjustment from the 
side of the university arises from the fact that 
it has been found impossible as yet to organize 
in the university any system of training in the 
actual practice of teaching that can be com- 
pared in efficiency with that to be found in our 
best normal schools. 

We are now well accustomed to the idea that 
all grades of education in this country are to be 
closely bound together, from the lowest to the 



200 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

highest. Our fidelity to the spirit of democracy 
requires this of us, and we are convinced that 
it is best in the long run both for science and for 
the national life. Continuity and coherence are 
watchwords of our educational organization. 

But just because the higher grades of instruc- 
tion are bound fast to the lower, we see the need 
of especial care that a steady progression shall 
be maintained in both the method and the con- 
tent of our teaching. No grade of instruction 
shall be allowed to lay a detaining hand of scho- 
lastic custom and inertia upon the grade above it. 
At no stage of our scholastic ascent shall we 
tarry for more than two years with instruction 
of essentially the same type or the same grade 
of diflBculty. 

Furthermore, we cannot be content with the 
standards of the past. Not only our own na- 
tional development, but, more particularly, our 
closer touch with the rest of the world, has shown 
us that our standards have been pitched too low. 
This is true both on the side of knowledge and 
on the side of skill in teaching. In our new 
position in the world it is not enough that we 
win patronizing approval of our science and of 
our school instruction from the older culture 
nations. That new position requires of us that 
we do our full part in determining what the 
world-standard shall be, both in pure science 
and in pedagogic practice. This is particularly 



UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 201 

difficult when half our teaching force is a rope of 
sand and when the profitable pursuits of ap- 
plied science are luring our scientists away from 
their laboratories. But these unfavorable cir- 
cumstances cannot relieve us of our responsi- 
bility; and a consideration of the higher 
attainments which the present times demand, as 
regards both knowledge and teaching skill, has 
an important bearing on the distribution of 
function between normal schools and universities. 
We are pretty well agreed that the knowledge 
of subject-matter and skill in presentation are 
both requisite in all grades of teaching, and that, 
broadly speaking, the skill is of greater relative 
importance in the earlier grades and the knowl- 
edge in the later years of schooling. A general 
recognition of this fact works automatically in 
the distribution of teachers, tending to place the 
graduates of colleges and universities in high 
school positions and the graduates of normal 
schools in elementary grades, mth a fair mingling 
of the two in the principalships and teaching po- 
sitions of grammar schools. Making allowance 
for many exceptions, I think we should be agreed 
that the public good is fairly well served by such 
a distribution. We must recognize the fact that 
high schools, of the type and standing now ex- 
pected in our high schools, must be mainly 
taught by those who have had collegiate or uni- 
versity training. The same should be said of the 



202 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

seventh and eighth grades of our grammar 
schools when they are taught on the department 
plan or offer studies of secondary grade. 

We need to get special knowledge and special 
skill into their right relations to each other, and a 
third element must be added, namely, special 
inborn fitness for teaching. The considerations 
which we have before us, then, range them- 
selves about as follows: 

It is of first importance that we attract into the 
business of teaching and into our training schools 
for teachers those who have the right stuff in 
them, the right kind of manhood and woman- 
hood, for such work. 

It is next in importance that these persons 
shall be well educated, as regards both general 
culture and special knowledge of some one sub- 
ject or group of subjects. 

Close after these requirements comes the re- 
quirement of technical training for the processes 
of teaching. 

President Alderman remarked, in his recent 
paper on The Growing South: "The ability of 
this generation to recognize education as some- 
thing larger than mere learning or even disci- 
pline, to perceive it as a great force moulding 
national character, has caused the enlistment into 
this field of work of young men and young women 
of creative capacity and exalted character, who, 
under other conditions in Southern history, 



UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 203 

would have instinctively turned to political and 
social fields of distinction and service." 

Such a condition is of the utmost importance 
for the teaching profession and for teachers' 
training schools of every kind. It can be brought 
about only through the concurrence of the whole 
set of conditions surrounding our educational 
system. All that can be done, by co-operative 
action of all persons concerned, will be needed 
to turn toward education, in the country at large, 
those who can best do the work of education. 

The second requirement, that the teacher be 
well educated, is emphasized here for two 
reasons: First, because a teacher needs such a 
grade of education as will give him an assured 
place with the best educated people in his com- 
munity, and so give to his influence in the school 
room the added weight of the respect of the com- 
munity; secondly, because the teacher needs 
such a standing with his pupils that his influence 
upon them will outlive their days of schooling. 
There is a kind of sldll in teaching, adequate 
and successful according to the standard of 
immediate requirements, sometimes markedly 
successful, which nevertheless is without depth, 
and so falls flat when it comes to the need of a 
lasting influence in the grown-up lives of those 
on whom it has been exercised. It is particularly 
unfortunate when it happens, as sometimes it 
does happen, that the most distinct and conscious 



204 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

moral impression is made by a teacher whose 
skill in teaching is not balanced by impressive 
and substantial scholastic attainments, a teacher 
who has become a pathetic memory and noth- 
ing more when his pupils have reached their 
maturity. 

The third requirement, that the teacher shall 
have mastered the art of teaching, is likewise 
emphasized here for two reasons: First, that 
his lack of skill may not come between him and 
his pupils, or indeed come between his pupils 
and their rightful education. The Apostle Paul, 
you remember, boasted that he did not frustrate 
the grace of God. And secondly, that the young 
teacher, particularly, shall be able to go into 
team-work with the rest of the teaching force. 
There is something pitifully lonesome for him- 
self and hampering to his fellows in the position 
of a highly educated teacher who has not enough 
of pedagogic interest and teacher-training to 
enable him to join hands with others in making 
the school a school. 

Now let us come back to the actual difficulties 
of present adjustment. A normal-school presi- 
dent said to me not long ago, '*If you want to do 
anything for the normal schools, help them to 
get out of the blind alley in which they find 
themselves." It was only another way of stating 
the difficulty which was mentioned at the outset 
of this paper. Another, a teacher in a normal 



UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 205 

school, put it in this way: ** Personal relations 
within the school are good, but intellectually we 
are starving." I am well aware of another side 
to the case. Individual presidents and teachers 
of normal schools have made their institutions 
fairly a-tingle with intellectual and aesthetic 
interest. Strong teachers continue to go into 
the normal schools, many of them bearing the 
higher degrees of the most advanced universities. 
But the blind-alley exists, not as a fault but as 
a situation. It appears in other unattached pro- 
fessional schools, in schools of medicine, of law, 
and of theology. It may be doubted whether 
an adequate remedy is to be found in empower- 
ing normal schools to offer collegiate courses and 
give collegiate degrees, though that plan may be 
justified where a full course of collegiate grade 
can be provided without detriment to the wider 
work of the institution. The obvious remedy 
is to bring the normal school into more intimate 
relations with the institutions in w^hich the high- 
est scientific work is done, to give it an appro- 
priate place in the university system of its state. 
Just how this is to be done in any given case, I am 
not prepared to say. The cases are extremely 
various. The present disposition on the part 
of our universities to break the undergraduate 
course in two at the close of the sophomore year, 
suggests that in some instances the normal 
schools might profitably offer, along with their 



206 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

other courses, the jSrst two years of the college 
course. One incidental adjustment which seems 
worthy of consideration is a regular and syste- 
matic exchange of instructors between the normal 
school and a university or certain universities. 
Such an exchange, when it settled into an ac- 
cepted routine, would, I believe, have advantages 
for both of the sides concerned. 

The second difficulty of which I spoke, that 
on the side of the university, is the difficulty of 
providing suitable practice teaching, particularly 
in schools of secondary grade. This difficulty 
has been partially met, in a variety of ways, at 
Harvard, Brown, Chicago, and California Uni- 
versities, at Teachers College, and other institu- 
tions. It does not seem to me that it has 
anywhere been fully met. It is comparatively easy 
to provide practice teaching of a grammar grade 
or in laboratory courses in the high school, but 
for high school class work outside of the lab- 
oratory, it is more difficult. The normal schools, 
by their successful organization of practice 
teaching of an elementary grade, have set a 
standard of practical training. And strong city 
superintendents and high school principals are 
demanding, with good show of reason, that they 
shall not be required to do the breaking-in of 
high school teachers, when the normal school 
accomplishes the breaking-in of teachers for 
elementary schools. 



UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 207 

In the main it seems to me that university 
authorities have not yet taken this problem seri- 
ously. Yet it is, I am persuaded, a problem 
which will have to be taken seriously. It is to 
be hoped that closer relations between normal 
schools and universities may lead to wider ex- 
perimentation in this field. I do not look for 
an altogether satisfactory outcome, however, 
till the matter has been taken in hand by some 
of our state legislatures. In a serious way, as 
part of the educational system of the state, the 
professional courses of our universities must, 
it would seem, be supplemented by regular pro- 
vision for special high schools organized expressly 
as schools for practice teaching ; or by apprentice 
teaching in designated high schools, after the 
manner of the German Probe jahr; or by both 
of these provisions with others added thereto. 



XIII 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AS A 
NATIONAL INTEREST 

Read before the Department of Superintendence of the Na- 
tional Education Association at its meeting in Chicago, 
February 25, 1909. Published in the Proceedings of 
the Department, 1909. 



XIII 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL 

INTEREST 

THERE can be no doubt that industrial 
education is needed to perpetuate the 
prosperity of our industries. This aspect 
of the case has been widely discussed, and may 
simply be taken for granted here. 

The point to be chiefly emphasized at the pres- 
ent time is that the great, dominant need of the 
United States as regards education is the same 
now that it has always been. It is the need of 
a body of citizens who are free, through intelli- 
gence and self-control. The main business of 
American education for the future as in the past 
is the training of our people to genuine freedom. 
And that means a training to intelligent self- 
direction in the paths of righteousness. We still 
believe that such training is possible, and that it 
is worthy of our best endeavors. 

Does this imply that special training for the 
industries is unimportant.^ Far from it. New 
wine may not be put into old bottles, but old 
wine must often be put into new bottles. The 



212 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

old spirit of our education must pass over into 
new forms of education to meet our present 
needs. In dealing with this newer education, 
we must have due regard for sameness and due 
regard for difference. Let us speak of differ- 
ence first. There is danger that our new, indus- 
trial education will be made so like the older 
education that its distinctive values will be lost. 
If we are not exceedingly careful, that will be 
the result where industrial courses are organ- 
ized in the old schools. We may get simply the 
old book-and-laboratory education masquerad- 
ing as industrial education. Such a fiasco is by 
all means to be avoided, even if we have to make 
new schools in which the new training may fully 
establish its different character. 

Let us next take account of unity. If we can 
fully secure the requisite difference, there is great 
gain in having the new courses organized in 
close connection with the old. We emphasize 
thereby the unity of our people in all of their 
classes and employments. But if the new train- 
ing must to some extent go into separate schools, 
let us by all means keep those separate schools 
in the closest spiritual connection with our gen- 
eral system of education. The special schools 
need such connection, and the general system 
needs it equally. A technical training which 
produces mere manual skill is not what we 
want. We want a technical training that shall 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 213 

educate. If our trade schools seek only to cul- 
tivate skill, they will not contribute to the im- 
provement of our industries; they will simply 
turn out superior machines for a stationary 
industry. On the other hand, if our general 
education does not eventuate in skill, it will 
give us a scholastic class, who can only look 
helplessly on the progress of an industrial life 
in which they have no part, as Sir Galahad in 
the castle gazed upon the procession of the Holy 
Grail. 

The bond of unity between general culture 
and training for a trade is the later development 
of our conception of general culture. We are 
familiar with that form of culture which takes 
one out of the limitations of daily life by means 
of ideas and associations which are remote from 
daily life. This is the liberal or classical culture 
in its various forms. Such culture is everlast- 
ingly justified; and a training which has no 
power to lift the learner out of the pit of present 
sense and experience can be only a truncated 
and inorganic fragment of an education. Where 
vision fails the people fail. But that higher cul- 
ture, too, is only a part, and it may work a pain- 
ful isolation of its possessor. Now we are finding 
ways of seeking out the hidden fire — the world- 
sentiments and world-ideas — forever latent in 
the plainest every-day life. When we have gone 
farther and have made every common environ- 



I 



214 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

ment yield up its inherent educational values, 
then the connection between scholastic culture 
and the trades will be confirmed and realized. 

Should the state concern itself with industrial 
education as herein set forth ? I think it will 
be under the necessity of so doing, in some meas- 
ure, both for the sake of its industries and, still 
more, for the sake of its citizenship. 

Should the national government have a part 
in the undertaking .^ That is a more diflScult 
question, but the answer may still, I think, be 
in the affirmative. The nation cannot be indif- 
ferent, it cannot but have the liveliest interest, 
where both its industries and its citizenship are 
concerned. From the beginning it has con- 
tributed to the furtherance of education in the 
states, largely by grants of lands, but in the 
case of the agricultural and mechanical col- 
leges by annual grants in money. This policy 
has been abundantly justified in its results. Its 
extension to schools of a somewhat different 
grade or character would be so slight a change 
that it could not be called a departure from our 
governmental traditions. 

But any far-reaching measure in this direc- 
tion should be taken with due care and foresight. 
It should not be taken at all if the matter can be 
adequately cared for by the several states. In 
any case it should not be taken in such a way as 
greatly to disturb the various state systems of 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 215 

educational administration. A careful exami- 
nation of those systems, as related to the pro- 
posed plan for national subventions, should be 
undertaken, and the federal government should 
proceed in the matter only in such way or in 
such ways as will strengthen the hands of the 
state educational authorities. 

Many interests, other than governmental, are 
profoundly involved in the industrial education 
movement. They must be considered in all 
fairness, but from the public and national rather 
than any private point of view. We cannot 
direct the industrial education in rural schools 
simply to the end of keeping young people on 
the farm. Young people in the country should 
have their fair chance for any honorable career, 
in city or country. But country life, too, should 
have its fair chance to make its legitimate appeal 
to these young people as well as the life of the 
city. 

The point of view of the employers of labor 
must be carefully considered, for the wisdom 
which the direction of great industrial concerns 
may have taught. But we must not permit in- 
dustrial education to be directed solely to the 
increase of production. That would be to sub- 
ordinate citizens to industries. Broad-minded 
employers are among the strongest opponents of 
so short-sighted a policy. 

The point of view of organized labor must be 



I 



216 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

carefully considered. However much objection 
there may be to the methods of any particular 
labor organizations, it is plain to see that organi- 
zation is better than disorganization on both 
sides of the industrial world. Here, again, the 
public good is the supreme consideration. We 
cannot willingly permit the policy of trade- 
unions to keep any number of our young citizens 
permanently barred from preparation for some 
honorable manual occupation. On the other 
hand, we cannot willingly permit industrial 
schools to be directed to the disorganization of 
labor. The relation of school training to ap- 
prenticeship in industrial education calls most 
urgently for fair and thorough investigation and 
for many and varied adjustments. 

And now, just here, we come to the main pur- 
pose of this paper. The national problem of 
industrial education must be solved by a co- 
operation of industrialists, politicians, and edu- 
cators. But the chief burden of the solution 
will be carried by one or another of these three 
classes. The men of business and the men of 
politics wield tremendous forces and bear tre- 
mendous responsibilities. They are entitled to 
the respect which these circumstances com- 
mand. But it is of the utmost importance to 
our national life that our educational profession 
shall be found worthy to take the lead in de- 
termining the course of our industrial education. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 217 

The public will be guided by our best judg- 
ment in this matter, if it shall appear that the 
school men and women are they who take the 
broadest, fairest, most genuinely progressive 
view of our position and our needs ; if they make 
some approach to unanimity in their attitude 
toward the newer proposals, which shall not be 
simply an immovable and unintelligent conser- 
vatism nor an equally ill-considered stampede in 
the new direction ; if they devise wise and prac- 
ticable plans for new undertakings, not asking 
large outlay for hasty ventures, but standing 
vigorously for well-thought-out plans of improve- 
ment. If these characteristics shall be manifest 
in the teaching profession of this country in the 
face of the present situation, the solution of the 
problem of industrial schools will be an educa- 
tional solution. And that, from the point of 
view of national interests, is devoutly to be 
desired. 



I 



XIV 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 

An Address delivered at the Graduation Exercises of the 
Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, at Rock 
Hill, South Carolina, June 2, 1908, and before the 
Department of Pedagogy of Wellesleij College, October 
17, 1908. An earlier draft of this Address appeared 
under the title, The Fine Art of Teaching, in The Edu- 
cational Review for November, 1898. 



XIV 

THE ART OF THE TEACHER 

IT is a very simple message that I have to 
bring you to-day. I wish to talk with you 
about the ordinary work of teaching school. 
We are spending a great deal of time and thought 
and money in this country in carrying out a 
large educational policy. But that large policy 
and those large expenditures all come back to 
this, that we are trying to put good teachers into 
the schools and get the pupils there for them to 
teach, and then to make sure that their teaching 
shall be done under such conditions as shall 
give them the fairest possible chance. What a 
few of us may do as regards general policies is 
a necessary circumstance. What the teachers 
and their pupils shall do in the schools is the 
main thing and the real thing. As soon as you 
begin your chosen work of teaching, you will be 
in the very thick of the conflict between light 
and darkness, between Ormazd and Ahriman; 
and some of us, in supervisory offices and bureaus, 
must look on from a distance, with now and then 
a pang of regret that we cannot share, at first 
hand, in your toils and triumphs. For my own 



222 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

part, I am sure that some of my most cherished 
recollections are those of the school room in 
which I had the daily teaching of every-day 
boys and girls. 

There are many sides of teaching that we 
might talk about, but I shall speak of only one. 
For my text I am indebted to a great Carolinian 
and Georgian whom I knew as a great Cali- 
fornian, that venerated teacher, Joseph LeConte. 
In one of his discussions of education as a sci- 
ence, Joseph LeConte gave a clew to the un- 
derstanding of education as an art. It is this 
education-art that we are to consider to-day. I 
mean education as one of the fine arts, having 
much in common with others of the fine arts. 

Professor LeConte, in the paper I have men- 
tioned, used these words with reference to the 
methods of education: *' Artificial they must 
ever be ; for education is art, and art must ideal- 
ize, not merely copy nature. But, like all art, it 
must be strictly based on nature. It must adopt 
the methods of nature and improve them." 

The first thing, then, that we are to note at 
this time is that the fine art of the teacher deals 
with real things on their ideal side. Natural 
science insists that we shall see truly, that we 
shall see things as they are. But art goes further 
and tells us that we shall see most truly when we 
see things at their best. Mr. Barrie has put it in 
one of his stories, *'To see the best is to see 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 223 

most clearly " ; and then he adds, **it is the lover's 
privilege." But the true teacher is a lover of 
children, and it is his privilege to see the best in 
them, even the best that is not yet, but may be 
brought into being. So a clear-eyed teacher 
knows how faulty at their worst his children are, 
how dirty they are and silly, how unpleasant in 
habits and dispositions. But he knows it without 
knowing it. 

"Be to their faults a little blind. 
Be to their virtues very kind." 

That is his wisdom for every day. He does not 
complain much of the naughtiness of his pupils. 
But he has a genuine glow of appreciation for 
their better qualities and for their promise of 
future attainments. 

'*Come and let us live with our children," is 
the version often given to the familiar saying of 
Froebel. But one who exercises the lover's 
privilege of seeing the best will be discriminat- 
ing in this regard. He will draw near to his 
pupils, but on the higher rather than the lower 
planes of their being. This is what Froebel 
himself did and what many another teacher has 
done. They drew near to their pupils, not by 
frivolous condescension to any mere childish- 
ness, but rather by leading those children into the 
uplands where they were themselves at home. 

Have you never seen a teacher talking easily 
and naturally with his pupils on higher themes 



224 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

than those with which they had been familiar — 
choosing his time, when their disposition was 
prepared for such approach, and choosing his 
words, that the things spoken might not be too 
easy nor yet too hard ? And have you not seen 
those pupils strive and strain to reach that higher 
ground, unwilling to disappoint the teacher's 
confidence or lose the new sense of higher powers 
which he has awakened within them ? It is a 
rare sight; but it may be met with if you look 
for it, in crowded primary schools of our great 
cities and in out-of-the-way country districts all 
over the land. There is real education in look- 
ing up and in reaching after something a little 
beyond our reach. We know it very well from 
our own experience. You cannot guide your 
pupils, to be sure, in regions where you are 
yourself a stranger. But a teacher who is press- 
ing forward to things barely apprehended as yet 
and not yet attained, may be the most helpful 
teacher of all, through a kind of comradeship 
of hope and aspiration. 

Even in the more external matters of good 
breeding, it is well for children to make a try at 
manners a little above their own. And we all 
know how good and necessary it is to keep try- 
ing at morals a little above our own. There is an 
illustration of such teaching as this, drawn from 
an old-time school in the South, which will carry 
my meaning more clearly than any general re- 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 225 

mark that I can make. I refer to a letter of 
Alexander H. Stephens to Richard Malcolm 
Johnston, in which Mr. Stephens gave an ac- 
count of a country school teacher whose pupil he 
had been, that teacher being Mr. Stephens' own 
father: "He took great pleasure in the act of 
teaching" — I quote here from the letter: 

His scholars generally were much attached to him. He 
was on easy and famihar terms with them without losing 
their respect; and the smallest boys would approach him 
with confidence, but never with familiarity. He had one 
custom I never saw or heard of in any other school. About 
once a month on a Friday evening, after the spelling classes 
had got through their tasks, he had an exercise on cere- 
mony, which the scholars called "learning manners," 
though what he called it — if I ever heard him call it 
anything — I cannot remember. The exercise consisted 
in going through the usual form of salutation on meeting 
an acquaintance, and introducing persons to each other, 
with other variations occasionally introduced. . . . These 
exercises, trivial as the description may seem, were of 
great use to raw country boys and girls. . . . Cheating, 
lying, and everything mean and dishonest he held up to 
scorn and abhorrence. He was, so far as I know, the only 
old-field teacher of those days on whom the boys never 
played the prank of " turning out." 

The old-field teacher, I suppose, is now ex- 
tinct. His work, and a great deal more, has 
fallen to the young women who graduate from 
our normal schools and colleges and go out to 
teach in a regular system of schools. Many of 

15 



«26 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

them will marry after a time — and the more the 
better, if their hearts go with their hands. But 
so long as they are in the schools, they are called 
on to practise as fine an art as was exercised 
by the best of their predecessors in any age; 
and that art will not be lost to the world 
if it be carried over into the narrower and 
deeper education of the home. President Sharp- 
less some years ago congratulated himself ''that 
whether our poor children were learning their 
lessons or not, it was a good thing for them to 
come into intimate relations for several hours 
daily with such lady-like teachers as one often 



sees." 



There is one way of reaching up into a larger life 
that is not always easy for our lady-like teachers 
themselves to learn, but which they must needs 
learn in order that they may teach it well in their 
schools. I refer to the lesson of civic life, the 
lesson of duty to the community and to the 
commonwealth. 

The wise woman from whom I learn much 
every day has been troubled to see children 
scattering papers and disfiguring trees and side- 
walks on their way from school. And it has been 
her dream that some day in our schools they will 
really come to an understanding of their part in 
the general responsibility for our community 
life. It is easy to tell them not to do this or that. 
May they not come to have things to do, as well 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 227 

as things to leave undone ? If some little part 
might be given to them in making their city or 
town or district a better place to live, they would 
be started on one of the largest lessons that our 
whole people has to learn. I recall with peculiar 
pleasure the flowers planted about the public 
square in Scranton, Pennsylvania, by the school 
children of that city, and other striking exam- 
ples might be mentioned. 

The life of our neighborhood, of our state and 
nation — it is a thing for which every citizen, in 
his measure, is responsible : great citizens, and 
little citizens, too. It is one of the things that 
take us out of our selfish selves, and make us 
reach up to the destined stature of our lives. It 
is one of the ideas that should be at work in our 
schools everywhere. Here the art of the teacher 
comes to one of its finest and severest tests : To 
hitch the wagon of his little school to this star of 
our national life, and cause the little children of 
our land to begin to live for the common good. 

But now this look at some large ideals of the 
teacher's art leads us to another characteristic of 
all fine art, and that is its care for proportion, its 
nice discrimination between things large and 
small. The sense for proportion is as indispen- 
sable in the school room as in the studio, for too 
often we waste our time on trifles. '*Good taste 
rejects excessive nicety," as Fenelon said; "it 
treats little things as little things." And good 



228 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

taste will save a teacher from some of the com- 
monest sins of the teaching craft. 

A teacher cannot afford to attain perfection in 
any part of his work, at the sacrifice of that which 
is better than perfection. The perfection which 
is attainable is too small a result for all our labor. 
It is not that which is carved to a finish which will 
satisfy us. We want for ourselves and for our 
children some vision of majestic, dim, unsculp- 
tured things. We want to find our studies 
opening up here and there a vista into some 
unknown country and tempting us to new ad- 
venture. The finished arch is good; but we 
would see through it 

"That untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
Forever and forever." 

There are those who would say that education, 
like literature, has had its ''age of the carved 
cherry-stones," and that our primary schools have 
not yet advanced beyond that age. And some 
would charge this over-emphasis on little things 
to the influence of women in the schools. But 
women have no monopoly of such influence. A 
petty man can nowhere be more petty than in a 
school. Matthew Arnold tried to get some big- 
ness into the prevalent conception of God. We 
need, all of us, to get more bigness into our con- 
ception of education, which is surely one of the 
works of God. 

Yet perfection in the smaller things has a part 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 229 

and place of its own. I think we may fairly say 
that all of our instruction has, of right, these two 
aspects of method running through it. Here we 
must have our work finished with exactness and 
nicety ; there it must be sketched in alluring out- 
lines. Both modes of treatment are needed, but 
they are differently proportioned and combined 
in different disciplines. 

Our teachers require, in fact, that same mixing 
of the elements in themselves that is called for in 
their instruction. We can be patient with the 
grand vagueness of a young teacher, full of crude 
and glowing immensities, provided he show 
himself able to condense some of his fire-mist 
into a definite and ordered system. And we can 
be patient with an old-time schoolmaster's fond- 
ness for system, if his system have not absorbed 
and cooled and hardened for him all of that 
primal nebula with which we may suppose him 
to have been once endowed. Our teacher shall 
have system and fire-mist, both at once. Let 
him show us a true cosmos, but if he have a 
little, wholesome, unperverted chaos left in him, 
we shall like him all the better for that. 

You will doubtless recall this fine combination 
of perfectness in little things wdth large sugges- 
tion of the outlying, cosmic things, as you have 
seen it in some of those by whom you have been 
taught. The artist makes the large things and 
the little things go together, as they belong to- 



230 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

gether, but each in its own degree and place. At 
one time it is a matter of supreme importance that 
c-a-t spells caU that two and two make four. At 
another time words and facts, grammar and his- 
tory, all are subordinate things, mere helps or 
hindrances, while the thing of import is that a 
group of young people shall become aware of 
some great tidal sweep and uplift, as in the Ode 
on the Intimations of Immortality. 

A class may work long, weary hours for the 
mastery of a lesson. Then at the end of the 
task the best thing, not infrequently, is reached 
in some hint from the teacher of the boundless 
range of thought upon which that little mastered 
lesson opens out. Yet that suggestion, too, 
would not have been possible, if the class had not 
first learned their plain and definite lesson and 
learned it well. So the great and the small, the 
definite and the vague, are intermixed, the one 
supporting and seconding the other, and neither 
the one nor the other is overdone ; and there we 
have in the finished work a well-ordered temper- 
ateness, with all the saving grace of wide variety. 
Such a work is a work of art, of one of the finest 
of all the arts, and such a work, I doubt not, some 
of you will achieve. 

There is nothing more useful to the maintain- 
ing of just proportions in this life than a genial 
sense of humor. A laugh is a dangerous thing in 
its way. It must needs be handled with judg- 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 231 

ment. But if it carry no sting and have some 
genuine refinement back of it, it can do a world 
of good. And its chief value is that it can save us 
from exaggeration. The old builders put gar- 
goyles on their cathedrals and we put cartoons 
into our newspapers. Once let our young teacher 
get so absorbed with his art that it runs away with 
his comnoLon sense, and the comic valentine, the 
ever-ready parody, or the surreptitious drawing 
of the school cartoonist, is likely enough to call 
him to himself. If he will not abuse it, the 
teacher, too, may wisely sprinkle a little salt of 
comedy upon the flat seriousness of his school. 
Even the forced buffoonery of the Hoosier 
Schoolmaster helped him over a hard passage in 
his hard experience. I suppose the tale has been 
forgotten in this present generation, and it is not 
good enough to repeat. But I may repeat a bit of 
college tradition, well known in some circles, but 
worth the telling even if it has been heard before. 
I fear it calls for scriptural knowledge which the 
present generation is none too sure of acquiring. 
The story as I have heard it is told of Professor 
Moses Coit Tyler, and belongs to his days in the 
University of Michigan. He was not always 
prompt to close his lecture with the end of the 
hour, and the boys of his class made known their 
disapproval by vigorous scuffing with their feet. 
One day the lecture was unusually prolonged and 
the noise of the students was unusually insistent. 



232 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

Taking notice at last, the professor raised his 
hand in deprecation. ''One moment, gentle- 
men," he said, "one moment"; and then he 
added, thoughtfully, "a few more pearls, a few- 
more pearls! " 

After I have tried my best to characterize that 
paragon, an artist-teacher, and find how near, at 
best, my description comes to a catalogue of 
"moral virtues and their contrary vices," I am 
disposed to poke a bit of fun even at this frail 
paper of my own. A genuine human being, though 
with many imperfections, is so much better than 
any paragon ! Better, even in that center of all 
things good and correct which is known as a 
model school. Any one who has ever loved a 
living girl knows that half of her charm lies in 
the fact that he could never by any possibility 
have invented her himself. And no synthesis of 
enumerated elements can ever construct for us a 
live and quickening teacher. 

But I shall have to answer my own gibe, and 
protest that this is not a paragon at all that I 
am setting forth and not at all a creature of my 
invention. It is because I have seen some gen- 
uine artists and found them teaching in real 
schools, that I am moved to tell what manner of 
work they were doing. They were artists in- 
deed, and for that reason my account of their 
performance must fall far short of its vivid 
reality. The human quality of the work, after 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 233 

all, is what I am seeking to bring before you, 
and it is a human impulse, I am sure, that 
prompts one to make such an attempt. The 
hope, moreover, that the account will call up in 
your thought the image of a human teacher, 
depends upon the hours that you yourselves 
have passed in the presence of living teachers 
who taught with creative power. 

Now, if a sense for proportion, as has been 
said, is of the essence of an artist's work, a matter 
of equal importance and still harder to attain is 
the genuine artist's sense for time. If the artist 
is genuine, he is willing to take time in order that 
he may get the better of time, for he is endeavor- 
ing to do a work that shall last, in spite of all that 
time may do. 

A spirit which is not the artist spirit is always 
seeking after the newest things because they are 
new. Maarten Maartens makes one of his 
characters say, **Your taste is entirely viti- 
ated, my dear, because you have no compre- 
hension of the beautiful out-of-date." In the 
same spirit Professor Jackman used to speak, 
with mild satire, to his class in a summer 
school. **You have come here," he would say, 
"to learn the latest fashions in the teaching of 
long division." 

Be sure of this, that what is now the mode and 
only the mode will after a w^hile be out-of-date. 
Whatever is new, it shall grow old. The only 



234 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

things that do not grow old are the things that 
never were altogether new. Whoever has the 
spirit of a true artist seeks to do a work that shall 
abide. Accordingly, as regards means and meth- 
ods, he cares more that they shall be true and good 
than that they shall be the newest of the new. 
You remember the lines, 

"He knew to bide his time. 
And can his fame abide.'* 

And Lincoln, of whom it was said, was one of the 
great teachers of the American people. Other 
teachers may well learn that lesson of his large 
and liberal patience. 

It is difficult to put this matter just right, for 
there is a patience that is weakness and there is a 
haste that is timely and necessary. Dawdling and 
loitering never were artistic processes. In fact, 
true art is scrupulous as regards waste. It exer- 
cises the finest economy. But it knows, too, how 
to spend without stint, how to labor on, quietly 
and unhurriedly, as nature brings the blossom to 
its fruit. Even the born artist must learn that 
perfect way, narrower than the scimitar's edge, 
between the imperfection of haste and the imper- 
fection of waste. 

Studies differ in this regard. Some can best be 
learned under pressure, with keen questioning 
that calls for quick and definite answer. In some 
parts of arithmetic this is true, and in the more 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 235 

mechanical parts of grammar and of history. But 
history in its finer and deeper things, Hteratiire, 
and the larger study of nature — these must be 
lived with, till they warm the soul and tinge the 
thought and take up their abode in the inner life. 
Facts are to be learned, sharply and decisively, 
without temporizing or dilly-dallying. But points 
of view, appreciations, attitudes of mind, these 
are gained slowly, and for these we must learn to 
wait. You may wait, without urging the learner 
at all, for a week, a month, a year, and it may be 
for many years. One day you shall see a new in- 
telligence flash into the eyes, the morning of a new 
life has dawned, and the teacher has received his 
great reward. 

Not only do studies differ in this regard: in 
almost any piece of teaching there is a time to 
push forward and a time to wait. From experi- 
ence in the class room, I am inclined to accept the 
view of those psychologists who say that there are 
plateaus in the process of learning any new thing. 
That is, there are times when continued effort 
fails to bring continued improvement, but when, 
if practice be carried steadily forward, the upward 
movement after a little begins again. The time 
of arrest is found to be a preparation for further 
gains. It requires fine insight and not a little ex- 
perience to put these plateau periods to their 
largest use. It may be best to turn aside to other 
things, to let that part of the subject lie fallow for 



236 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 

a while. It may be best to go forward, and let the 
upward trend of improvement set in again when 
it will. When the children of Israel came to the 
Red Sea, Moses said, "Stand still, and see the 
salvation of God." But when he laid the case 
before Jehovah, the answer came, ''Why criest 
thou to me ? Speak unto the children of Israel 
that they go forward." 

Now, there is one way that the question of time 
enters into the inmost soul of teaching. For it 
has to do with the personal character of the 
teacher himself, and that is about the most vital 
thing for any school. There are teachers, and 
you have known them well, who have power to 
carry their pupils with them, whatever they may 
do. It is a power of strong suggestion, and it 
may become even hypnotic in its degree. It can 
produce quick and striking results, for it gains an 
autocratic ascendancy over the pupils' minds. 
We have all seen the warm enthusiasm which a 
"magnetic" teacher can arouse. Plis personal 
attractiveness lends new life to the school. Where 
others must plod, he lends, as an old writer put it, 
"not feete, but wings." 

Now, one who has such power as this, has a 
keen weapon which may cut for good or ill. He 
may use it for immeasurable good. He may 
arouse the sluggish, he may give new hope to 
those who have become discouraged, he may tide 
over the crisis of some lives by his inspiring influ- 



THE ART OF THE TEACHER 237 

ence. But, on the other hand, he may work great 
harm. He may attach his pupils so closely to 
himself as to make them dependent upon him for 
the incentive to all endeavor. 

A test of such a teacher's work may be found 
in the experience of the teacher who comes after 
him. Have the pupils become more self-reliant, 
or is their strength and interest gone with the 
leader who galvanized them into an artificial life ? 
The true artist in the school may have much or 
little of the power to awaken enthusiasm, but the 
best of his work abides. A great teacher, indeed, 
is one who leads us to think great thoughts, but 
the greatest teacher is the one who helps us most 
after he himself is gone. Jesus said to His disci- 
ples, ''It is expedient for you that I go away." 

But this discussion should not be prolonged. 
It is meant to do no more than make a small be- 
ginning on a large subject. You will soon be 
going out into your great and good work of teach- 
ing school. Let me bid you God-speed. When 
Dean Colet founded St. Paul's School in London, 
in the days of Henry the Eighth, he wrote these 
words, "I charge the maisters that they teche all- 
ways that is beste." Let us take his words for the 
very different work in which you are to engage — 
and yet it is the same; and so I charge you, 
young women, that you teach always things that 
are best. 



INDEX 



INDEX 

[Names of Persons are in Italics.] 



Abbott, Mary N., 187. 

Adams act, 52-53. 

Agricultural and mechanical col- 
leges, establishment, 50-53. 

Agricultural education, Adams act, 
52-53; and Benjamin Franklin, 
49; Columbia college, 50; de- 
velopment, 45-59; early interest 
in, 46-47; Hatch acts, 52; his- 
tory, 49-53; Michigan, 50; 
Michigan state agricultural col- 
lege, 48, 50; Moor's Indian 
school, 49; Morrill acts, 50-52; 
Nelson amendment, 53; Penn- 
sylvania, 50 ; training of experts, 
54. 

Agricultural societies, formation, 
47. 

Agriculture, first seed distribution 
by Government, 47. 

Alaska, introduction of reindeer, 
130-131. 

Alderman, E. A., on The Growing 
South, 202-203. 

Apprenticeship system, 48-49, 138. 

Arbitration, international, and the 
pubhc schools, 99-109; day of 
special observance recommended, 
99-100. 

Art, leadership of Europe, 127; 
moral imj^lications, 73. 

Art of the teacher, 221-238. 

Association of practical housekeep- 
ing centers. New York, 177-178. 



Associations, educational. See Ed- 
ucational associations. 

Attendance, school, statistics, 157- 
159. 

Ayers, L. P., on dwindling of pub- 
hc school classes, 159-160, foot- 
note. 

Backward children, school, 125. 

Barrett, John, on commercial rela- 
tions with South America, 141. 

Bell, Andrew, monitonalsy stem, 124. 

Bureau of education. See U. S. 
Bureau of education. 

Carnegie technical schools, 
Pittsburgh, and apprenticeship, 
138. 

Child-labor laws, 155-157. 

Children, United States, some of 
their needs, 147-165. 

Children's nurses, training, 171- 
172, 174-176, 178-179. 

Christianity, interpretation, 91-92. 

Cincinnati, University of, address 
dehvered at, 27-41 ; experiment 
in engineering course, 138. 

Cities, government, 30 ; higher life, 
28-30; influence of universities 
on, 36-41 ; influence on hfe, 35 ; 
institutional hfe, 33; pubhc 
press, 32 ; public schools, 33-34 ; 
representative men, 31-33; self- 
respect of, 27-41. 



16 



242 



INDEX 



Colef, Dean, on teaching, 237-238, 

Columbia college, agricultural edu- 
cation, 50, 

Compulsory education, 154-157. 

Conference of governors, states and 
territories, at Washington, D, C, 
6-7. 

Congress, influence of, 3, 

Connecticut, agricultural societies, 
47; pubUc trade schools, 138. 

Consultations de nourrissons, Paris, 
176-177. 

Cottage instruction, children, Lon- 
don, 177-178. 

Crime and education, 9. 

Curriculum, elementary schools, 
comparative study (Payne), 116- 
117. 

Democracy and education, 67- 
68. 

Democracy and religion, 71-72. 

Department of agriculture. See 
U. S. Department of agricul- 
ture. 

Department of superintendence. 
See National education associa- 
tion. 

Draper, A. S., on number of teach- 
ers, 140-141. 

ficoLE DES MERES, Paris, 176. 

Education, alhed with science, 63- 
64, 67-68; ally of religion, 71; 
apprenticeship system, 138; com- 
pulsory, 154-157 ; curriculum, 
elementary schools, comparative 
study (Payne), 116-117; ele- 
mentary, influence, 8-10; ele- 
mentary schools, non-sectarian, 
an original contribution to, 129; 
emergence of world-standards in 
school and university, 141-142; 
and federal government, 21 ; 
Germany, leadership, 127-128; 
Germany, system of liigher, eft'ect , 



on student, 149 ; high schools, an 
original contribution to, 129; 
humanism, new, 114-116; in- 
dustrial, a national interest, 211- 
217; invention in field of, 121- 
143; kindergarten, not assimi- 
lated in educational system, 123- 
124 ; leadership of Germany, 127- 
128; manual labor schools, 49- 
50 ; Massachusetts, 4 ; monitorial 
system, 124; moral, in Japan, 
80-81; New England states, 4; 
normal schools and universities, 
distinctive functions in prepara- 
tion of teachers, 199-206; pub- 
Uc schools, city, 33-34; and in- 
ternational arbitration, 99-109 
rehgious, pubhc schools, 65 
reUgious and secular, 63-73 
school attendance, statistics, 157- 
159; Sloyd system, 125; taxa- 
tion, support of schools (Web- 
ster), 4; teachers, international 
comity, 140-141 ; teachers, train- 
ing, 199-206; women, higher, 
139-140 ; women's organiza- 
tions, work of, 187-195. 

Education and crime, 9. 

Education and democracy, 67-68. 

Education and the state, 9-10, 15- 
24. 

Educational associations, interna- 
tional, 140-141 ; possible co-op- 
eration betMeen those of differ- 
ent countries, 113-118; state, 
co-operation, 142. 

Elementary education, influence, 
8-10. 

Elementary schools, American, non- 
sectarian, original contribution 
to education, 129. 

Federal government, and educa- 
tion, 21. 

Franklin, Benjamin, and agricul- 
tural education, 49. 



INDEX 



243 



Froehel, F. W. A., 124, 223. 
Fry, Mrs. Elizabeth, 188. 

Germajsty, leadership in educa- 
tion, 127-128; system of higher 
education, effect on student, 
149. 

Government by influence, 3-24. 

Governors, conference of, state and 
territorial, at Washington, D. C, 
6-7. 

Hague, The, International peace 
conference, 99. 

Hare, A. J. C, 188. 

Hatch acts, 52. 

Henderson, C. R., 176. 

High schools, American, an orig- 
inal contribution to education, 
129. 

Higher education, German system, 
effect on student, 149. 

Holt, Dr. L. E., on training of chil- 
dren's nurses, 179. 

Industrial education, a national 
interest, 211-217. 

International arbitrcation. See Ar- 
bitration, international. 

International congress on the wel- 
fare of the child, address before, 
147-165. 

International peace conference, at 
The Hague, 99, 100. 

Interparliamentary union, 113. 

Inventions, electric railway, first 
operated, 122; field of education, 
121-143; mechanical, 122. 

Japan, Imperial rescript, 80-81. 
Johnston, R. M., 225. 

Keller, Helen, 130. 
Kelley, Mrs. Florence, on training 
for mother- work, 177-178. 



Kindergarten, not assimilated in 
educational system, 123-124. 

Kindergarten nurses, training, 179- 
180. 

Labor, organized, and industrial 
education, 216. 

Lake Mohonk conference on inter- 
national arbitration, address be- 
fore, 99-109. 

Lancaster, Joseph, monitorial sys- 
tem, 124. 

Le Conte, Joseph, 222. 

Legislation, methods discussed, 13- 
17. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 234; signing of 
Morrill act, 51. 

Manual labor schools, agricul- 
tural education, 49-50. 

Massachusetts, agricultural soci- 
eties, 47 ; education of youth, 4 ; 
public trade schools, 138. 

Michigan, agricultural education, 
50. 

Michigan state agricultural college, 
48, 50; address before, 45-59. 

Miele, Dr., 177. 

Moll-Weiss, Mme. Augusta, 176. 

Monitorial system, success and ul- 
timate failure, 124. 

Moral instruction, Japan, 80-81. 

Morality, culture, 77-96; and re- 
ligion, 69-73. 

Morrill, Justin S., and endowment 
of agricultural and mechanical 
colleges, 50-52. 

Mothers' congress, 147, 160. 

Mother-work, problem of prepara- 
tion, 162-165 ; training, 169-184. 

National council of education, 
addresses before, 113-118, 199- 
206. 

National education association, co- 
operation with similar bodies in 



244 



INDEX 



other lands, 113, 117-118; de- 
partment of national organiza- 
tions of women, address before, 
187-195; department of super- 
intendence, address before, 211- 
217. 

National government, agricultural 
education, 50-53; industrial ed- 
ucation, 214-215. 

National organizations of women, 
147-148. 

Nelson amendment, 53. 

New England states, instruction of 
youth, 4. 

New York, agricultural societies, 
47. 

Normal schools, and universities, 
distinctive functions of, in prep- 
aration of teachers, 199-206. 

North Carolina, University of, ad- 
dress deUvered at, 3-24. 

Nurses, children's, training, 171- 
172, 174-176, 178-179; hospital, 
training, 172-174; kindergarten, 
training, 179-180. 

Patent office. See U. S. Patent 
office. 

Payne, B. R., on comparative study 
of public elementary school cur- 
ricula of the leading culture na- 
tions, 116-117. 

Peace conference, international, 
The Hague, 99, 100. 

Pennsylvania, agricultural educa- 
tion, 50; agricultural societies, 
47. 

Reindeer, Alaska, introduction, 

130-131. 
Religion and democracy, 71-72. 
Rehgion and moraUty, 69-73. 
ReHgion and science, factors in life, 

66-67. 
Religious and secular education, 

63-73. 



Religious education, public schools, 

65. 
Religious education association, 

address before, 63-73, 169-184. 

School gardens, 125. 

School hfe, overlapping with Ufe of 
wage-earner and producer, 152- 
154. 

Science and education, 63-64, 67- 
68. 

Science and pubhc service, 20-24. 

Science and rehgion, 66-67. 

Secondary education. See High 
schools. 

Secular and religious education, 
63-73. 

Sharpless, President, on school- 
teachers, 226. 

Sloyd system, 125. 

Social service and science, 20-24. 

South, the growing (Alderman), 
202-203. 

South Carohna, agricultural soci- 
eties, 47. 

State and education, 9-10, 15-24. 

State universities, influence, 10-11; 
influence on government, 19. 

Stead, W. T., 116. 

Stephens, A. H., letter to Richard 
Malcolm Johnston on old -field 
teachers, 225. 

Teachers, art of, 221-238; inter- 
national comity, 140-141 ; train- 
ing, 199-206. 

Thorndike, E. L., on dwindling of 
public school classes, 159. 

Trade schools, 138. 

U. S. Bureau of education, 52; 

and agricultural education, 58- 

59. 
U. S. Department of agriculture, 

work, 52, 58. 



INDEX 



245 



U. S. Patent oflSce, 122; center of 
national pride, 126. 

Universities, in cities, relation to 
school system, 37-38; influence, 
7-8, 34-37, on cities, 36-41, on 
government, 15-20; and normal 
schools, distinctive functions, in 
preparation of teachers, 199-206 ; 
state, influence, 10-11, on gov- 
ernment, 1.5-20. 

University, American, an original 
contribution to education, 129. 

University extension, 125. 

University of Cincinnati, address 
delivered at, 27^1; experiment 
in engineering course, 138. 

University of North Carolina, ad- 
dress delivered at, 3-24. 

University of West Virginia, ad- 
dress delivered at, 3-24. 

Vanderbilt university, address 
delivered at, 77-96 



Vassar college chapter of Phi Beta 
Kappa, address before, 121-143. 

Vocational schools, 173-174. See 
also Trade schools. 

Washington, George, on influence, 3. 

Washington, George, interest in 
farming, 46. 

Webster, Daniel, on taxation for 
support of schools, 4. 

Wellesley College, address deliv- 
ered at, 221-238. 

West Virginia, University of, ad- 
dress dehvered at, 3-24. 

Winthrop normal and industrial 
college. Rock Hill, S. C, address 
delivered at, 221-238. 

Women, higher education, 139- 
140 ; organizations, national, 
147-148, work in education, 
187-195. 



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